SeanReadsTheNews

Bloomberg: Consumers Will Drive M&A in 2010

Jeffrey McCracken of Bloomberg News writes that M&A will come back in 2011 as consumer spending drives companies to combine.

The 26 percent recovery in global M&A for 2010 didn’t live up to the expectations of some dealmakers after a dearth of megadeals. In 2010, only two takeovers topped $25 billion, fewer than the four announced in 2009, according to Bloomberg data. At the same time, the number of deals ranging from $1 billion to $5 billion in size jumped 52 percent to 369 in the same period, the data show.

Private-equity firms have made fewer large purchases in recent years, even though they have more than $430 billion to invest, based on figures from Preqin Ltd. There is, however, the capacity for more straightforward corporate takeovers that don’t involve private equity, said Andy Lipsky, head of Credit Suisse Group AG’s mergers and acquisitions for the Americas.

The article covers the waterfront of large deals, small deals, the extent recovery has happened and why it might run in 2011.  McCracken, who used to have the same beat at The Wall Street Journal, has the experience to see the forest and the trees, making his take a step above a generic list of quotes by market leaders.

 

Portfolio - Best Business Movies of 2010

Steve Rosenbush of Portfolio.com covers the Best Business Movies of 2010 as the year comes to a close.  It's getting toward the end of the short day here on the East Coast so I figured everyone needs something fun and mindless to page through.

Steve's view of The Social Network, An Inconvenient Tax, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Inside Job and Casino Jack among others is a fine way to do that.

Some of their efforts failed miserably. The Cartel, a look at the education business and the charter schools in New Jersey, was panned upon release. And some of their efforts produced middling success. You will doubtless learn a lot from the documentary An Inconvenient Tax, but it's not exactly a popcorn movie. Freakonomics won muted approval. And then there's Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, Rebel. It is bound to be entertaining look at one of the last century's most notable entrepreneurs, but it was dismissed as being a bit on the light side.

He notes that he's waiting for a financial fraud prison movie next year.

WSJ on the Year in Crisis Communications

Suzanne Vranica of The Wall Street Journal covers the year in Crisis Communications, featuring BP, Toyota, Facebook, Google, Apple and more!

Normally I wouldn't cover a perfunctory year-in-review piece such as this - but it is about PR so here goes.  My favorite part was her quoting the PR man that - I've heard - journalists love to hate.

PR consultants say Toyota was slow to respond and didn't clearly explain the cause of the problem. "They didn't engage quick enough," says Michael Sitrick, chairman and chief executive of Sitrick & Co., a crisis PR firm that recently represented Mark Hurd during his ouster from Hewlett-Packard Co.

It's nothing regular readers wouldn't have seen already but interesting that PR is important enough to drive a story like this.

Signature Story: NYT Decries Availability of WiFi at Technology Conferences

The New York Times may be the nation's paper of record, whose slogan is "all the news that's fit to print," but increasingly it's a paper targeted at the monied elite and it shows.  There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but it's funny to see a paper that claims to be the tribune of the oppressed writing long stories about the national crisis of inadequate wi-fi coverage at technology events, as Vern G. Kopytoff did today.

Last month in San Francisco at the Web 2.0 Summit, where about 1,000 people heard such luminaries as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, and Eric E. Schmidtof Google talk about the digital future, the Wi-Fi slowed or stalled at times.

Earlier this year, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s chief executive, had to ask the audience at his company’s developer conference to turn off their laptops and phones after his introduction of the iPhone 4 was derailed because of an overloaded Wi-Fi network.

Oh the humanity!  Seriously.  This needs to be in The New York Times' business section?

WSJ: Why You Can't Build Golf Courses in Greece

Sebastian Moffett of The Wall Street Journal today pens a sad commentary on the Greek economy, all done by describing in detail exactly how hard it is to build a golf course there.

"There is a matrix of laws and a whole list of approvals that deter many investors," says Mr. Tzoannos, a director of Dolphin Capital Partners. "This maze does not only deter investors, but also overwhelms governmental employees as they, too, are often unsure of what needs to be done."

Many times, clients of mine with a big economic idea - the economy of Greece is not competitive, for example - they will expect the media to interview them about the implications of their big idea.

This article is an example of how thought leadership around broad ideas really works with the top tier press.  Find an example, with specifics, that illustrates the point - in this case golf development.  Then focus on that example and use it as the means to pull through your broader message.

Most economists could probably explain why Greece doesn't work - but the media savvy one who notices Greece only has six golf courses even though it's in a warm weather zone with perfect geology for it - will get the ink.

 

WSJ: Chuck Norris Conquers the Czech Republic

In this week between holidays, the entertainment section of SRTN is in full swing, and this article by Gordon Fairclough and Leos Rousek on the popularity of martial artist Chuck Norris in the Czech Republic definitely qualifies.

The ads, featuring Mr. Norris in humorous encounters with Czech Christmas customs, have turned into a pop-culture phenomenon, which is starting to spread outside of the Czech Republic into Central Europe.

One of the spots—all produced by the Prague office of Saatchi & Saatchi —shows Mr. Norris in the kitchen of a Czech family preparing a traditional Christmas Eve dinner of fresh carp. His hostess asks Mr. Norris to kill the still flapping fish with a wooden mallet. "You're the master," she says.

Mr. Norris shakes his head, no. Then, as the woman raises the mallet to smash the carp's head herself, Mr. Norris faints. As the hostess tries to revive him, her husband says, gleefully, "On TV, anybody can be tough."

The article makes an important point about the globalization of U.S. culture - oh the heck with it.  It's funny because it's about Chuck Norris being the most popular spokesman in the Czech Republic.  Just read it.

 

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204685004576045742920566766.html

AP Unemployment Porn: Man Makes Living Suing Spammers

Paul Elias of The Associated Press finds a hilarious little story of unemployment porn - Daniel Balsam making a six-figure living suing spammers for targeting him with illegal messages.

Balsam settles enough lawsuits and collects enough from judgments to make a living. He has racked up well in excess of $1 million in court judgments and lawsuit settlements with companies accused of sending illegal spam.

Elias found in Balsam someone using an inherent weakness of our legal system for productive purposes.  Harassment in court that would be just wrong when conducted against an honest business seems perfectly fair when engaged in against e-mail marketing companies.

The writer does give the targets a chance to respond, and they hew closely to what message points I'd put forward if one of these companies were my client as well.

"There is nothing wrong per se with being an anti-spam crusader," said Kelley, who has sued Balsam twice for allegedly violating confidentiality terms in settlement agreements. "But Dan abuses the processes by using small claims court.

"A lot of people will settle with him to avoid the hassle," Kelley said.

That said, these guys wrote the book on hassle and it seems like this is one example where doing everything correctly, PR-wise, can't help because the facts are just bad.

Personally, we're waiting for the spam message that tells us we can earn a six-figure income working from home by suing spammers.  The universe owes us this.

 

Signature Story: NYT Compares Comedian Stewart to Murrow

So many ideological bloggers have already made mincemeat of this New York Times story by Bill Carter and Brian Stelter comparing comedian Jon Stewart to Edward R. Murrow that SRTN almost feels like we should let it pass - but really - Stewart is only like Murrow in the bad ways.  That would be the way the radio reporter turned ideologue himself after moving to TV and deciding that his reports should just tell the story but enforce his view of the story as well.  It also repeats a historical inaccuracy that his hit piece on Joe McCarthy aired before America had already turned on the Senator and not after (something that is acknowledged even in "Good Night and Good Luck").

Edward R. Murrow turned public opinion against the excesses of Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s. Mr. Thompson noted that Mr. Murrow had an even more direct effect when he reported on the case of Milo Radulovich, an Air Force lieutenant who was stripped of his commission after he was charged with associating with communists. Mr. Murrow’s broadcast resulted in Mr. Radulovich’s reinstatement.

Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are also politically tinged entertainers whose opinions move Congressional action from time to time - any bets on the next time one of them gets compared to Murrow?  Really guys - not up to your standard here.  It's like you want Andrew Breitbart to make fun of you or something.

 

Portfolio: U.S. Workers Flee to Booming Australia

Geoffrey Rogow's Wall Street Journal article on Americans seeking their fortunes in Australia hit home as one of my favorite former co-workers and her two American children decamped for there about a year ago.  Of course, she and her husband are from Australia so it wasn't that big a leap, but it does show that where once this was the only place to be for smart, ambitious people, now it isn't.

Which brings us to Mr. Rogow.

Daniel Davila, a 23-year-old timber floorer from Camarillo, Calif.—a Los Angeles suburb knee-deep in the Golden State's housing dust bowl—made the 14-hour move across the Pacific two years ago. He had been forced to take a job stocking shelves at a local grocery store for $8.90 an hour when he couldn't get work installing floors.

On a good day in Australia, he now makes as much as 50 Australian dollars (US$50.21) an hour—about twice the going rate for a typical flooring job in the U.S. He plans to start his own flooring business.

Australia also used to be paranoid about immigrants taking advantage of their social welfare benefits - but I guess not so much now that the place is booming.

Australia's labor laws don't make it easy for Americans to jump on a plane and start working. Between paying for Australian trade schools to get the skilled worker's degree required to practice his trade here and getting the appropriate visas, Mr. Davila estimates staying in Australia has cost him about $40,000. Longer-term 457 visa hopefuls must be sponsored by a company with visas for in-demand jobs, such as nurses, builders and engineers, and prove they meet Australia's demandingcriteria.

 It's an important trend that I hadn't seen getting major media coverage before.

 

And of course, it also makes me think of one great Clancy Brother's song about an earlier wave of emigrants to Down Under.

Hat Tip: Steve Rosenbush.

 

 

Bloomberg: Hedge Fund Will Use Twitter to Pick Investments

The New York Times and Bloomberg News both report on a new hedge fund that intends to use Twitter to track trends pick investments.

While Bloomberg focuses on a specific story, The New York Times spies a trend.  Both stories are interesting but I'll give the Times a nod for placing the development in the context of an extension of existing data-scraping schemes.  Bloomberg, on the other hand, delivers a study with numbers that suggest Twitter's sentiment gauge can be 88% accurate in predicting the direction of the stock market (uh huh).

From Jack Jordan at Bloomberg:

The Derwent Absolute Return Fund Ltd., set to start trading in February with an initial 25 million pounds ($39 million) under management, will follow posts on the social-networking website. A trading model will highlight when the number of times words on Twitter such as “calm” rise above or below average.

A paper by the University of Manchester and Indiana University published in October said the number of emotional words on Twitter could be used to predict daily moves in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. A change in emotions expressed online would be followed between two and six days later by a move in the index, the researchers said, and this information let them predict its movements with 87.6 percent accuracy.

From Graham Bowley at The New York Times:

Tech-savvy traders have been scraping data out of new reports, press releases and corporate Web sites for years. But new, linguistics-based software goes well beyond that. News agencies like Bloomberg, Dow Jones and Thomson Reuters have adopted the idea, offering services that supposedly help their Wall Street customers sift through news automatically.

Some of these programs hardly seem like rocket science. Working with academics atColumbia University and the University of Notre Dame, Dow Jones compiled a dictionary of about 3,700 words that can signal changes in sentiment. Feel-good words include obvious ones like “ingenuity,” “strength” and “winner.” Feel-bad ones include “litigious,” “colludes” and “risk.”

By rights, these should have been two hacked-up pre-holiday stories using buzz words to sound scary but lacking substance.  Both reporters deserve credit for including actual news.