A Debit to The Economist for a special report on how digital technology is making us “nomads.”
You may recall the relatively recent frenzy over telecommuting, and how we were all going to never get stuck in traffic or get stuck in a gray, fuzzy-walled cubicle. That didn’t really pan out, at least not to the extent its prophets had predicted. Now, the Economist looks at another (dated, we might add) trend: digital nomads, working from their laptops and BlackBerrys in coffee shops and on park benches.
The magazine (or newspaper, as it likes to call itself) goes on and on, and on some more, about digital nomads for more than 10,000 words. Look, we work in coffee shops on occasion, and the issue of technology and social change is vital. But The Economist doesn’t do it justice by printing a painfully long think piece with very little actual reporting.
If you want an overview of current academic arguments, you’ll enjoy this. If you want to hear about how people are using technology in interesting ways—surfing the Internet at Starbucks doesn’t qualify—don’t bother.
At more than a dozen pages it’s more manifesto than magazine piece. And like many manifestos, this one leans utopian, but our main problem with the report is that there’s too much talking to academics and not enough other reporting. It also presents news from 2006 as if it’s cutting edge. For scholars that is pretty close to cutting edge. For a weekly, it’s just late.
Congratulations not in order
A Debit to the WSJ for ill-advised credit-taking in a special report on executive compensation.
Editor Lawrence Rout gives credit for a supposed stricter-boards trend to the Journal’s Joann S. Lublin for her reporting on the issue last year. The note hedges, of course, and says “perhaps” she deserves “some” credit, but it strongly implies the paper has been out front on this issue, when that is not the case.
We understand an editor’s impulse to pat a good reporter on the back. But the fact remains The New York Times has done much better, more sustained work for longer on this subject than the Journal. Gretchen Morgenson has for years produced strong work about unhinged executive pay, as have others at the paper, as well.
The WSJ’s Editor’s Note begins:
I’m not giving Joann Lublin all the credit, but…
Last year’s Journal Report on executive pay featured a cover story by Joann, ‘Ten Ways to Restore Investor Confidence in Compensation.’
The note touts the influence of one of the executive-comp stories in the previous year’s special report, drawing parallels between what Lublin suggested and what some boards have started do.
Rule No. 1 last year: Make sure the board’s pay consultants don’t also work for management. No. 1 on Joann’s list this year of things that boards’ compensation panels are starting to do: retaining their own lawyers.
That’s fine, but Eric Dash of the Times wrote a similar story more than three months earlier, as part of a New York Times series called Gilded Paychecks, offering “eight steps that compensation experts say might rein in executive pay.” His first tip was: “Hire independent advisers.”
The Times didn’t drop the issue with that series. It put out another special report on executive pay earlier this month, minus the self-congratulation. And it disagrees with the Journal on the impact of any changes that have taken place. Here’s Times reporter Claudia H. Deutsch:
Wasn’t 2008 supposed to be the year of shareholder victory on the executive compensation front?
After all, tighter disclosure rules kicked in last year, and—the theory went—once companies had to shine a spotlight on their compensation practices, they were bound to make them better. Politicians, never loath to acknowledge the national mood—particularly in an election year—held several hearings about excessive pay.
But signs of sweeping change remain few.
The Times has earned greater credibility on this subject.
Even so, as the Times‘s Dash reminds us (with our emphasis):
Despite the growing attention over the last 25 years, the average chief executive’s compensation at big companies increased more than 600 percent, to $8 million dollars a year after adjusting for inflation. Meanwhile, the ratio between the average pay for a top executive and a worker, which held steady in the 30 years before 1980, has more than quadrupled, to a multiple of 170, according to recent academic research.
If unaccountable boards were a problem, then journalism has not been the solution; executive pay is simply not an area for victory laps.
A deeper look at the schools crisis
A Credit to The Wilson Quarterly for Jay Mathews’s excellent article debunking the myth that U.S. students are undereducated, unmotivated, and dragging down the American economy.
It turns out, as is too often the case, those observers who lament the decline of American schools have overlooked class divides. The article’s subhead sums up the problem:
Bad schools are not going to sink the American economy. Despite what the headlines say, U.S. students fare well in international comparisons. It’s the schools serving the poor that demand our attention.
Variety: Not great, from the gate; also late
Variety gets a Debit for a virtually valueless front-page story on the Olympic challenges facing NBC.
For NBC, the headlong plunge into the Olympics in Beijing poses a higher-than-usual degree of difficulty.
Protests directed at China’s human-rights record—yielding chaotic images as the Olympic torch toured Europe, before its lone U.S. stop in San Francisco—threaten to turn the marathon leading toward the Aug. 8 opening ceremonies into a gauntlet. And they may portend more tension during the Games themselves, with China admitting April 10 that it had cracked down on a ring intending to kidnap athletes, journalists and tourists.
If this had come a week earlier, it would have been news. In the April 14-20 edition, it’s just stating the obvious.
Rehashing events doesn’t cut it at a weekly magazine. We picked up Variety because we thought it might have an interesting angle on TV coverage of the games. But we learned next to nothing from this piece. (We prefer an April 2 Sacramento Bee article.)
Getting Pansy right
Portfolio goes on the Credit side of the ledger with a nice piece on our favorite casino heiress: Pansy Ho. This is not a new story—the New Jersey and Las Vegas press have been following it doggedly—but Portfolio nicely weaves months of developments together.
For those who are new to The Audit: MGM wants a license to build a casino in Atlantic City. But New Jersey regulators have taken their sweet time in ruling on that license application because of the company’s Macau partnership with Pansy Ho. Ho is a problem because her billionaire father has ties to organized crime, so she needs to distance herself from him in order for MGM to get the license.
Got that?
This story is so complicated it’s easy to get wrong, but Portfolio gets the fundamentals right, and the piece is eminently readable. After all, we’ve got most of the major vices here: gambling, prostitution, money laundering, and more.
Crucially, reporter Sean Davies doesn’t fall for the spin, as others have.
Harry Potter and the Unedited Blog
Debit to The Wall Street Journal for its Harry Potter fest last week. We first noticed this excessive attention when we saw a midday post on its Law Blog that described the first day of the J.K. Rowling trial in mind-numbing detail, replete with spelling mistakes.
The Harry news didn’t stop there. We also got a Law Blog piece after the trial ended for the day and one in the Journal print edition the next day. Not to mention a catalog of Potter pieces over the next few days.
The Internet can be an excellent supplement to print coverage, but throwing reams of sometimes unedited information at readers is not useful. The WSJ needs to hone its thinking on blogs.
A strong leder on Merrill
We give a Credit to The Wall Street Journal for a front-page piece on Merrill Lynch taking on ever-greater risk even as the credit market was weakening. Backed by solid reporting, Susan Pulliam, Serena Ng, and Randall Smith tell us:
When housing boomed earlier this decade, Merrill profited by turning mortgage-backed bonds into complex securities. Initially, it was well protected from credit risk in this underwriting. The protection frayed at the start of 2006. But Merrill kept playing the game…
By early 2007, as cracks in the housing and mortgage markets widened, Merrill again missed a chance to scale back. In fact, it revved up its production of complex debt securities—despite a shortage of buyers for them—in what turned out to be a misguided effort to limit its losses.
In giving us a look at how risk became more and more acceptable at Merrill—and with excellent anecdotes, we might add—the Journaltells us something about how Wall Street got us into this mess.
Crain’s tugs on Sox
Lastly, a Credit to Crain’s for an April 14 Small Business Report article on how the shortage of CPAs since Sarbanes-Oxley has meant that small businesses and accounting firms can’t find enough number crunchers. This piece, by Tina Traster, moves forward an ongoing story, covered notably by BusinessWeek, on how small companies are having trouble competing with large corporations for the much-sought-after expertise of the biggest accounting firms.
Elinore Longobardi is a Fellow and staff writer of The Audit, the business-press section of Columbia Journalism Review.