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| Columns, Commentary and Blogs Hybrid Journalism for Old and New Media |
| One of my favorite things is to step back from reporting the news to tell people what it means -- and what they should do about it. Often, this means I end up writing in formats like blogs or columns that are more important as the industry dives deeper into the online world. Some examples: I was BusinessWeek Online's first blogger, running the Googleblog feature during the weeks around Google's IPO. Our Google coverage was a finalist for the New York Deadline Club prize in 2005, a contest competitive enough that one Pulitzer winner actually lost and another was forced into a tie. The voice of these pieces gets looser and bloggier as the week of the IPO wears on, because we were gradually getting the hang of it -- both me and my editors, who began resisting the urge to turn Googleblog back into the usual BW Online copy. (We covered the deal for BWOL because Google's IPO happened during the one week in summer when BW doesn't publish the magazine. Look Here, here, here, here here and here. When BW began blogging officially the next year, my Deal Flow blog became a staple on the blogroll of other major business Web sites. BW has taken Deal Flow down since I left, but some of my entries live on at Seeking Alpha. At BW, I also did a column called Clicks and Misses that reviewed Web sites. In a shameless Siskel & Ebert ripoff, we came up with little Click and Miss logos and told you what clicked and what missed about this Web site or that. My old boss Kathy Rebello thought this would be a feature someone different would be drafted to do every Many of the best and silliest examples aren't on BW's site. I'll see if I can locate them and put some up here. A hallmark of Steve Shepard's BusinessWeek was its use of the commentary format that let us blend analysis and reporting in a way that anticipated the impact of the Internet on media. We could sound off on Orbitz corporate governance, Priceline's need for a bold leap to grab a few billion dollars for management, the best way to account for Amazon.com's profits or the tech industry's love of stock options. There were actually lots of other examples, but BW's prehistoric search engine can't seem to produce several of my favorites. At The Baltimore Sun, I'd use the Sunday Perspective page to do political commentary. This one got picked up nationally, this was topic A on the city's top-rated talk show the next day, and these takes on baseball and politics, local and national, are pretty good too. I generate buzz if you want or need me to. |
