Whiteley launches new managment blog aggregator

Interesting new service from Philip Whiteley (via Judith Townend) who is launching a new campaign: for more effective coverage of management in UK media.

He told Journalism.co.uk that

“It is also a reaction to the feeble coverage of the Kraft-Cadbury merger in mainstream newspapers in which business journalists repeatedly refused to put any tough questions to the Kraft or Cadbury leadership on the very high risks and integration costs that mega-mergers involve,”

and

The new management project will collect blogs and other web news sections and launch a ‘blog of blogs’ – “a summary from the management blogosphere”.
Whiteley will circulate this to the Human Capital Forum’s database (16,000 subscribers) on a monthly basis, with the possibility of extending that to the databases of all participants.

A question of trust

There are two big issues regarding the survival of news organizations: trust, and business models.

The words of Craig Newmark writing at the Huffington Post adding that

News orgs earn trust by visibly doing a lot of fact-checking, and by keeping their financial interests separate from reporting. The latter means that the income of the news org should not influence what or how they report.

Crain prefers the paywall

Interesting news that Crain's are to stick to their paywall for business news in the North West despite fears of a downturn.

Speaking to paid content,

14 months after its launch, the publication now has more than 1,250 print subscribers and got 52,475 unique users in the four weeks to January 11—50 percent up on the previous month

and added that

the mag has made advertising revenues of £320,000 in 2009 to date, including forward bookings. At this point last year it had made £12,000, though it was just three months old. Digital represents about 10 percent of total revenues, with a sponsorship deal for its 8,000 daily emails contributing a major share of that.

Pearson results show the demand for quality financial journalism

There are some encouraging signs for the top end of the journalism business with the release of Pearson's preliminary results this morning.

The group's website reports that

The Financial Times Group continued to achieve good growth - in particular at Interactive Data and Mergermarket - but FT Publishing saw a decline in advertising revenues (which now account for 4% of Pearson's sales).

The FT website saw growth of 9 per cent year on year and register users increased from approximately 150,000 at the end of 2007 to 966,000 by the end of last year.

Ft to target the Chinese investor

I blogged yesterday about the theory that paid online content would be viable as long as it provides a differentiated product.

Financial information must be top of the list for that particular type of information and the FT announces this morning that it is to luanch a new subscription only site aimed at Chinese investors.

According to Paid Content

The new publication is in keeping with the UK business paper’s focus on offering more premium digital content. And since world markets are continuing to flail, China still looks like a comparatively solid place to invest.

Why did reporters miss the crunch? A US take from an ex reporter

I'll attest that business journalists as a rule are as smart, sophisticated, and plugged-in as they seem. And yet that army of professional business reporters—an estimated 9,000 or so nationwide in print alone—for all practical purposes missed the biggest story on the beat. Why?

writes former Wall Street Journal staff writer Dean Starkman.

Much has already been written on the subject and more no doubt still will be.

According to Dean in a long and detailed piece

There was a handful of heroes at the major publications who tried to get the word out. But the good, hard-hitting, arm's-length stories will have to be compared to what else was gushing out of the 30-inch business-news drainpipe—those Citigroup earnings stories, those edgy-yet-flattering profiles of Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal, Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld, et al., the pieces noting how Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo liked to dress well, etc., not to mention the Home Depot marketing stories, the personal finance columns, and all the cheerleading and Flip That House fluff that diverted resources from the real task at hand.

One reason that Dean identifies is the newsroom cuts which he says coincided with the first warning signs of the end of the bull market.

But that wasn't the only reason

Jesse Eisinger, a former financial columnist for the Journal and now a senior writer for Portfolio, says the paper, like business journalism generally, clung to outdated formulas. Wall Street coverage tilted toward personality-driven stories, not deconstructing balance sheets or figuring out risks. Stocks were the focus, when the problems were brewing in derivatives.

Peston points the figure

Last night's journalism leaders forum at Uclan never really got started until the question and answer session at the end.

The star of the show,the BBC's Robert Peston, appeared via webcam.

Ahead of his appearance this morning in front of the commons select committee looking at the media and the financial crisis,he recognised that the media would have to look closely at itself in how it reported the crisis.

However his anger was directed at the people he termed those on he termed the people on high salaries who are paid to monitor and regulate.

Kevin Anderson,head of Guardian blogs, made the point that he felt the media had failed to do their job."a failure of journalism is when someone asks why should something that happens in China makes me lose my job" he said.and added that another of the failures arose due to the global nature of the crisis

"Journalists didn't act globally together to pull together the global elements of financial complexity."

There was also a consensus feeling that PR and the advertising model had a role to play.Journalists were perhaps a little too eager to take for granted what they were being told.

Head of journalism at the college Mike Ward questioned the panel as to whether people would lose interest in economics once the green shoots of recovery start to appear.

As a conclusion,the panel agreed that there was a shortage of financial journalists.Perhaps,they felt, journalists need the essential skills of understanding business to report on that same business