SeanReadsTheNews

The New York Times Fact Checks LEED Standards

After the recession, the biggest fad in business journalism lately has been sustainability, or the ability of business to better manage its raw material consumption, carbon footprint and so on.  It's a broad category and its popularity with business reporters has led many corporate communicators to brand every initiative they have as "sustainable."

One of the first-movers in the space was the LEED standards for green buildings, which cover efficiency in water and energy use.

Mireya Navarro today in The New York Times has an interesting article on how well buildings meeting the LEED standards do in delivering on the promises of reduced environmental impact and finds them lacking.  The article is pegged to an admirable initiative by the Green Building Council, which administers the LEED standards, to collect data from LEED buildings and determine how well they perform in practice.

The article reports that LEED has been around since 1998, however, and readers are left to wonder why the Green Building Council is just getting to testing and measurement now.

Still, Navarro's article shows that journalism can still cast a critical eye on a popular subject without being a hit piece.  The Green Building Council should also get credit for sharing specific information about its own failings while at the same time charting a path to become more effective.  That's textbook public relations but too many companies would rather avoid the tough issues until gadflies and hostile media are at the front door. 

While this initial article may be negative, it will create goodwill for those involved that will help their reputations in the long term.

CNBC - Defining the Lowest Common Denominator Down

This mornings CNBC Highlight's headlines read like a parody of TV News from The Onion or Metro News One, the fictional network that figures in CBS sit-com "How I Met Your Mother."

First, there is the feature on how individuals are facing the recession.  These thin portraits are the business journalism equivalent of asking the families of accident victims how they feel.

Then, is your Facebook account setting you up for burglary?  That almost comically poorly researched story relies on research conducted by a third party that demonstrates how willing people are to "friend" strangers and then reveal their travel plans, theoretically making them vulnerable to burglary.  Yes, this story included no actual anecdotes of anyone being burglarized because of Facebook.  In fairness to CNBC, this was a pick-up of a Reuters article that ran without attribution.

What's the biggest risk of the UBS/U.S. cooperation to crackdown on Americans hiding assets in Switzerland?  Your ex-wife may turn you in, according to CNBC (and every other major news source weeks ago).  Well, that hits their audience demographic, I guess.

The Sports Business Report covers speculation that racecar driver Danica Patrick might pose nude for ESPN the magazine.  The economics of sports in the U.S. is one of the most interesting stories developing now both in terms of its excess and the first-ever signs of a pullback in growth.  Matthew Futterman of The Wall Street Journal and his colleagues turn out moving, insightful stories on nearly a daily basis.  There is news here that people will watch - this kind of story just isn't necessary.

And finally, the personal finance report covers the comeback of layaway as a means to purchase big ticket items by folks who burned by the credit crunch.  At least this article actually has examples of companies such as Sears relaunching layaway programs and identifies at least a couple of people who are doing it but overall the story feels like the last term paper due before Spring Break.

Halley's Comet - Workers Want Better Jobs When the Economy Recovers

Here's another survey-driven article from USA Today on worker loyalty and how the bond between employer and employee is broken by reporters Laura Petrecca and Anita Bruzzese.

Covering well-trod territory about how employers have the upper hand now while workers secretly scheme to get better deals, the article registers very low on the "tell me something I didn't know" scale.  Perhaps one nugget is a quote from an executive coach on how employees who expand their skills by doing the jobs of laid-off colleagues will be more marketable during an upturn.

As Gannet Retrenches It Covers and Makes News

The Monday New York Times always has a package of articles on the media business headlined by David Carr's column, which today covers reorganization at Gannett's Journal News in Westchester.

Carr works hard to be fair to a process that as a journalist he must find repellent, forcing veteran reporters to reapply for their existing jobs and quizzing them on their new media skills as the Journal News attempts to move to a more online-focused delivery system.  In the process, 70 of them lost their jobs.

At the same time, I checked Gannett's USA Today this morning to find an analysis by Julie Appleby on the ethics of pricing in health care and its impact on older Americans.  Appleby has for years made USA Today's coverage of the health insurance market competitive with the other national papers and it's good to see her back writing.  The article had good quotes from young and old on how much they pay for insurance and why as well as from various activists attempting to regulate premium fees.

What was most interesting was Ms. Appleby's byline, which was from the Kaiser Health News.  Much as Gannett is trying to bring costs in line with revenues at the Journal News, it apparently also can no longer afford to pay Ms. Appleby directly for her services.  The Kaiser Family Foundation - which is independent but originally funded by profits from selling health insurance - can. 

Kaiser Health News has also hired Mary Agnes Carey, a long time health care reporter for Dow Jones Newswire and Congressional Quarterly.  As the profits from providing news fall, news organizations are taking on more and more content contributed from outsiders, usually to good effect. It will be very interesting to see if Kaiser Health News will succeed as a model for delivering sophisticated news coverage in specialized areas.

NYT Probes Conflict of Interest From PR Man's Column in WSJ

Mark Penn, the CEO of Burson-Marsteller, last seen stepping down from the Clinton presidential campaign because Burson was pursuing a trade deal on behalf of Colombia at the same time candidate Clinton was condemning same, had another conflict of interest issue surface this week regarding his ongoing column in The Wall Street Journal Online.

Ably covered by Richard Perez-Pena in The New York Times, basically what it argues is that Penn's colleagues used a recent column on the micro-trend of glamorous camping, "glamping," as an opportunity to pitch new business from related industries. 

What?  You didn't read Penn's column on "glamping?"  

These are times when you can't help channeling Claude Rains in Casablanca, "I'm shocked, shocked, that a businessman would use a platform in a major media outlet to try and get more business!" 

Why else would the CEO of one of the largest public relations firms in the world bother to write a column every two weeks for about $800 a throw?  Frankly, I've seen a lot worse abuse of similar platforms in my career.

The real question here isn't whether or not Burson's marketing tactics were cricket - all byline articles will be used for marketing in some form - but whether or not "glamping" is a real trend and furthermore whether the news of the day was enhanced by the column.

I knew Perez-Pena when he worked on the health insurance beat at the NYT and he doesn't pull any punches.  Strange that he didn't raise that question in his article.

BW Takes a Look at a Historic R&D Lab Going Global

In general, I will stay away from stories like this feature on IBM's new R&D strategy by veteran technology journalist Steve Hamm in today's BusinessWeek because if you're IBM you'll get stories like this and if you're not, you won't.  Starting a media strategy session with "First, you need to develop a global 60+ year history as a technology innovator, and once you've done that, then we can..." won't get you very far.

However, Hamm's article is such a great example of how to use a story on a specific company to provide wider lessons about a range of issues, I'm including it anyway.  

The strategy is a series of global alliances to develop R&D jointly with universities and labs abroad - a stunning turn from IBM's go-it-alone history.

The lessons:

1) Technology R&D is going global.  Sun Microsystems had major programming centers in Russia and India. IBM is going with joint ventures.  The lesson: knowledge and talent are no longer concentrated in the U.S., U.K. and Japan.

2) The oil-rich Arab nations are investing heavily in education as they get nervous about a future where the oil doesn't count for as much.

3) You can work with the Chinese without ending up looking like Robert Shaw at the end of The Sting and what's more, you have to if you want to compete either for their talent or for their markets.

4) The devil in the details will be intellectual property.

This article is a must-read for anyone pitching thought leadership on offshoring, global trade, R&D, technology, immigration and a host of other issues.

Bair Necessities: Washington Post & Fortune Examine FDIC and Bank Regulation

There is a herd of elephants trampling after the "pending bank consolidation" story today, including the cover story of The Wall Street Journal.

Two stories stood out, in The Washington Post and Fortune for the way they each wrote strong but very different stories pegged to the same information, fresh FDIC data on how many U.S. banks are troubled.

In the WaPo, David Cho focuses on FDIC Chief Sheila Bair's attempt to keep saving the big banks during the recent crisis from creating a de facto oligarchy in the U.S. market and how so far, she is failing.  Much as the government decided to react to the auto and housing bubbles by coming up with strategies to reinflate them, Cho's article spells out ways the government is trying to protect us from the risk of "too big to fail" banks by making them bigger.  While Bair's quotes lead the story, there is strong content from both community banking associations and bank executives later in the story.

Extra special PR Tip of the Day: this is the first article in an ongoing series, so get on Cho's call list today!

Colin Barr over at Fortune, writes from a more investment-oriented perspective, looking at the result of overall weakness of the banking market and handicapping the potential impact of consolidation.  Consultants and economists live to speculate, so they were heavily involved in Barr's article as were banks who wanted to make sure they are positioned as acquirers rather than sellers.  Bair makes a cameo appearance at the very end - Barr's signal without saying that M&A is going to be the controlling narrative of the story, not regulation.

Fortune on Why There Is So Little Competition in Healthcare

Shawn Tully's Fortune Magazine series on fixing the U.S. health care system continues today, intersecting this blog for the first time.  Tully has been a senior writer at Fortune for a very long time and he is among the finest practitioners of long-form magazine journalism.  Here he shows how to boil down complex issues to make it clear where the real problems are - and he does it without engaging in politics or political argument.

His four points about the favored status of Blue Cross/Blue Shield plans, unintended consequences of rate deals negotiated by Medicare and Medicaid, including driving out potential new competition, deliberately restricting the supply of doctors and curtailing investment in new medical facilities, identify basic problems in pricing that should be amenable to bi-partisan solutions.

Multi-part series are tricky to pitch because often the reporter has basically one mammoth story in mind when he or she starts it, broken into parts only because of length.  So when you call after part one and ask "Did you look at why Blue Cross' contract in New Jersey prevents other insurers from undercutting them with the major hospitals," if it doesn't fit the outline he has in his head, it won't go anywhere.

Still, the volume and variety of business leaders, industry consultants and service providers quoted in this article would definitely make me want to get in on the party.

Bloomberg News on the Auction Rate Securities Market

I was late to the party on the collapse of the auction rate securities market, blog-wise, as the story broke long before I started.

Dunstan McNichol's article today on Bloomberg.com is a good place to get caught up since it covers the emerging damage done to several A-list businesses due to misuse of the financial instruments.

He neatly captures the core of the problem - which was that these vehicles were being used like money market funds and once the illusion of safety was shattered, nobody wants to restart the market, leaving everyone who owned one before the crash with literally no way to unload them at any price.

So many companies have lost so much money that the lawsuits are being applied by fire hose, and McNichol does a good job of cataloging the suits and providing each side a chance to explain its position (loosely summarized as, "you told us this would be safe," and "you [messed] up, you trusted us," respectively).  The plaintiffs got the better of the exchange because they spoke directly to the reporter while the investment advisers issued generic statements through lawyers.  While you need to be very careful about not saying anything that will upset a judge at this stage of a litigation, a direct statement to the effect of "We marketed this instrument to sophisticated buyers who had access to the best legal and financial counsel available.  We also lost substantial sums in the market turmoil and our mutual focus would be better served by looking forward rather than backward," would have been better.

Health Insurance Workers in the Mist - NYT Discovers Humanity at Humana

Back when I worked with a major Northeastern health insurance provider, I observed that the health system in the U.S. is designed to make the insurers wear the "kick-me" sign.  Congress, regulators, doctors, patients, hospitals, etc., never have any incentive to say "no" to any request, no matter how outlandish.  They've set the system up so all of the tough decisions are left with the insurers.  Of course, in return the insurers get 30% margins, so it's not exactly a hard-luck story but you did start every media interaction on the back foot.

The New York Times' Kevin Sack today indulges in a kind of reporting conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg called, "Conservatives in the Mist," in which reporters set out to study a foreign body (Goldberg was referring to young Republicans) and find, gosh, they are real people just like you and me!

Sack's article is about how workers at insurance companies deal with being the villain of every article about health care reform and has all the same tropes. 

The article is a round-up of quotes from mid-level health insurance workers and the trauma they face daily for doing their jobs.

It comes across as sympathetic but only if you buy into the premise that the criticism was warranted in the first place.  News-wise, it's suspect.  This story is about as close to a beat-sweetener as you're likely to see on this topic as it doesn't tell you anything substantial about the health care debate.  I start from the position that employees at any company have hobbies and families - why devote news space to that?