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leaks
great moments in journalism
4 things BusinessWeek won't tell you about its under-30 entrepreneurs
The problem with lists like BusinessWeek's collection of 13 under-30 entrepreneurs: Inevitably, in an effort to fill a demographic quota, editors scrape the bottom of the barrel. And presenting a balanced picture of these business novices cuts against the goal of serving up fresh faces. (Whether they're supposed to make BusinessWeek's 50something readers feel either young again or even older, I'm not quite sure.) Here are some things that BusinessWeek would just as soon you not know about members of its boy band: More »
videogames
BusinessWeek releases "Web-based" games that download to your computer
With great fanfare, BusinessWeek released a compilation of twenty "free, independently developed Web-based games" on its website today. "Casual games," free games that are easy to play and addictive (think Tetris), are big business. Nickelodeon recently announced it was developing 600 games for its websites. Why is BusinessWeek playing tastemaker in this market, though, under the guise of praising the outlandishly simplistic videogames for their "design"? More »
great moments in journalism
The Web comic BusinessWeek won't show you
BusinessWeek reporter Catherine Holahan dropped in on BitStrips, a Web-comics startup showing off its wares at SXSW. (Really, who goes to the SXSW trade-show booths?) In Holahan's blog post on the subject, she faithfully transcribed BitStrips founder Ba's thoughts on why he created a website that automates the production of cartoons which look like they were drawn by 5th-grade students. But oddly, she didn't hit on something far more topical: How Ba himself attacked her colleague Sarah Lacy for her keynote interview with Mark Zuckerberg in an "editor's pick." That comic strip, which I'm betting you won't see on BusinessWeek.com anytime soon: More »
nerdfight
Slide's funding brings out reporters' knives
Scoops are important to journalists. But do readers care? Some writers persist in thinking so. I can't remember ever seeing such backbiting over a humdrum funding announcement: Kara Swisher of AllThingsD scooped everyone last Friday with a rumor that Slide, Max Levchin's Web widget maker, was raising a big funding round. Sarah Lacy of BusinessWeek had more details of the $50 million round in an already-written column published to the Web after Swisher's post. Brad Stone of the New York Times weighed in that afternoon. And that's when the knives came out. More »
forecasts
BusinessWeek journo: Facebook grinds to something in 2008
"2008 is the year Facebook grinds to — not a halt — but definitely a slowdown. The backlash is already here. I've said it before; I'll say it again: Facebook flight." Ah, the sweet, juicy sound of BusinessWeek's Arik Hesseldahl plopping his cojones on the table. We credit his bravado, but he's wrong. Beacon was bad for Facebook on the blogs, but users hardly noticed.
conflicts of interest
Old media attempts to break up Larry and Lucy
BusinessWeek is trying to call a halt to Larry and Lucy's wedding! We get that Google is killing your print-ad sales. We get that being dependent on Web searches for, say, half of your traffic or whatever scares the bejeezus out of you. But really, mainstream media, this is a low blow — trying to put a pause on marital bliss with a conveniently planted scare story on billionaire prenups? More »
media
We do TOO have a lot of traffic, says BusinessWeek
In the category of "the best defense is a good offense": The editors at BusinessWeek are not interested in anyone's analysis of why their website's traffic lags Forbes.com and Fortune.com—even when it says they're not to blame. Silicon Alley Insider's Peter Kafka tried to give them a break, yesterday, saying that a 24/7wallstreet.com report blaming their crappy numbers on crappy content was faulty analysis; they were actually the victims of poor distribution. Fortune.com, for example, benefits from all the traffic at CNMoney.com, while BusinessWeek.com stands alone on the web. Yet editor-in-chief John Byrne responded by saying that the ComScore numbers were completely wrong. Yes, they probably understated the case, but they weren't completely out of the ballpark, even according to Kafka. So the question remains: why DO they lag so far behind the other financial sites? I'd pick poor distribution. It's a lot easier to fix.
breakdowns
At McGraw-Hill's business newsweekly, someone decided, apparently, to do some late-summer database cleaning. BusinessWeek accidentally updating its RSS feed with some really thrilling stories. Headlines include: "More news today than ever," "Headline bla bla," and "just another headline that we need to fill in." Subheads — known in the news business as "decks" — also suffered: "Deck bla Deck bla Deck bla," "But this time we are testing FedEx campaign handling," and "testing the pp9 ad."
BusinessWeek goes off its (RSS) feed
At McGraw-Hill's business newsweekly, someone decided, apparently, to do some late-summer database cleaning. BusinessWeek accidentally updating its RSS feed with some really thrilling stories. Headlines include: "More news today than ever," "Headline bla bla," and "just another headline that we need to fill in." Subheads — known in the news business as "decks" — also suffered: "Deck bla Deck bla Deck bla," "But this time we are testing FedEx campaign handling," and "testing the pp9 ad."
valley foxes
Smoking Sarah Lacy
Amid all the kerfuffle over her BusinessWeek cover story, and subsequent book deal, there's one salient fact about Sarah Lacy that most commentators are way too politically correct to mention: she is the hottest reporter in the Valley. No, make that the hottest reporter in the tech world — ever. More »
amazon
BW Faces Amazon in Softball Season Opener
Valleywag contributor Theo DP shreds BusinessWeek's typically gushy cover story on Amazon and founder Jeff Bezos. More »
google
Business Week's Turn to Blow Smoke
Business Week has pulled a NYT and does a calorie-free article on Google. Headline: How Google's Garden Grows. Makes you want a chop a tree down, don't it? The cell phone with faked google screen has nothing to do with the article, CNN.com must be handling BW's graphics now. More »
businessweek
BusinessWeek: Make up your damn mind
A selection of BusinessWeek headlines from the last 12 months: More »
sarah lacy
Second scoop: More on the book that "$60 million" bought
As the Big Lebowski says, new shit has come to light. Sarah Lacy, who co-wrote the BusinessWeek cover story "How this kid made $60 million in 18 months" (about Digg founder Kevin Rose, who now jokes constantly with friends and Digg users about the $60 million he doesn't have), will leave the magazine for a year to work on her book about Web 2.0, she said in an e-mail. More »
sarah lacy
Scoop: BusinessWeek bubble blower gets book deal
Call it "How this BusinessWeek writer made $500k with one bubble" — Sarah Lacy (pictured right), co-writer of the BusinessWeek cover story that pumped up boys of the bubble and gave Digg founder Kevin Rose a made-up valuation of $60 million, scored a lucrative book deal on the same subject. More »
yelp
The Inside Yelp
Remember the fuss over BusinessWeek's cover story, "Valley Boys," a few weeks back? I know, we forgot about it too. But a few alert readers pointed out that feature writer Sarah Lacy has a little undisclosed connection to the story. More »
youtube
Remainders: YouTube still doomed
- Tech blog GigaOM explains why Fox Interactive won't buy YouTube. For why no one else will, see this Valleywag list. [GigaOM]
- Viacom doesn't need YouTube either, thanks to a sweet distribution deal they just cut with Google Video. With this deal, other sites can embed shows from MTV, Comedy Central, and such; the embedded vids carry ads, and Viacom and Google split the revenue. In other words, everything New Media is Old Media again. [International Herald Tribune]
- Google is paying $900 million to Fox Interactive if all goes right with its plan to power the search on several Fox sites — most importantly, MySpace. [Battelle's Search Blog]
- The San Jose Mercury News discovers, two months after the fact, that blogger Robert Scoble left Microsoft. Call it the "Late Edition." [Mercury News]
- Did BusinessWeek backpedal by editing the print version of its "Digg is worth $200 million" story after bloggers tore apart the online version? Or did the magazine always plan tell online readers one thing and print readers another? [Techdirt]
- Our big sister Gawker, exploiting the convergence of media and tech to totally step on our turf, reports that tech-media vet Alan Patricof dumped $5 million on the Huffington Post. (Disclosure: Founder Arianna Huffington is Gawker publisher Nick Denton's honorary girlfriend, judging by their party photos. I have a writer's account at the Huffington Post that I never bothered using. Patricof writes for the Huffington Post. One of Patricof's older investments was a startup run by Michael Wolff, who called Patricoff a crank in his book Burn Rate.) [Gawker 1, Gawker 2]
