May 23, 2011 8:03 am : Comments 000
I’m not a life-of-the-party kind of guy, which may explain why one of my simple pleasures on any given Friday night for many years was reading the latest issue of BusinessWeek while drinking a stiff martini. Under the 21-year tutelage of Steve Shepard, the magazine served up an impressive mix of news, features, and insightful analysis written by experienced and collegial reporters who were bent on producing great journalism and not promoting their individual brands. In Shepard’s day, quality journalism actually drove circulation, not social media, Google rankings and the like. Something was clearly working: BW’s readership increased some 40 percent while Shepard ran the show.
Shepard left in 2005 for academia and replaced by Stephen J. Adler, an aloof, Ivy League-educated former Wall Street Journal editor who, it is rumored, was once a front-runner candidate to lead that newspaper. Adler literally drove BW into the ground by diminishing the quality of its journalism and implementing a questionable redesign. When he exited the doors four years later, BW’s value had deteriorated so badly it was hardly worth the paper it was printed on. BW’s longtime owner McGraw-Hill nearly shut it down, but opted instead to essentially give it away to Bloomberg L.P.
Josh Tyrangiel
At the time of the acquisition, Bloomberg had already become the premier U.S.-based business news organization. In terms of collective talent and experience, it has unquestionably surpassed The Wall Street Journal, a feat accomplished in part by poaching a substantial number of that newspaper’s journalists and editorial alumni. Yet despite its experienced in-house stable of capable editors, Bloomberg tapped Josh Tyrangiel, a 37-year-old Wunderkind from Time to be BusinessWeek’s editor and renamed the publication Bloomberg Businessweek.
To fully appreciate the chrysalis-to-butterfly transformation of Bloomberg Businessweek under Tyrangiel’s nearly 18-month reign, you need to understand three things: he had no previous business journalism experience when he took the job; he is, according to his boss Norm Pearlstine, a “true dude;” and he likes to pal around with fellow unabashed “dude” magazine editors.
To his credit, Tyrangiel has restored some of BW’s former excellence. The publication once again is chock full of insightful and tightly written articles, and its overseas business coverage is considerably broader. BW’s graphics are impressive as are its business book reviews, and its iPad app does Steve Jobs proud. Suffice to say, BW is once again as compelling as…well, as compelling as Tyrangiel himself.
That said, readers still want substance over style, and on that front Tyrangiel’s lack of business experience is abundantly clear, particularly in the magazine’s cover stories.
BW last year ran an appallingly naïve profile of Charles Schwab, portraying the founder of his eponymous brokerage as someone who champions the interests of individual investors. While that is how “Chuck” – and his marketing team — like to portray the founder and his company, the facts are very much at odds with the story line, as this story by New York Times reporter Floyd Norris makes clear.
More recently, BW ran a gushing cover story about Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, painting her as a sensitive and caring boss who sometimes cries at work and provides “adult supervision” for the company’s young staff. The reporter was so smitten by Ms. Sandberg that he opted to gloss over the not insignificant detail that the FTC will soon decree that Facebook’s privacy policies constituted “unfair and deceptive” practices and the company will be subject to periodic privacy audits. As the story went to press, news was breaking that Facebook had hired Burson-Marsteller to conduct a clandestine campaign attacking Google’s privacy policies without disclosing that Facebook was behind it. Ms. Sandberg, a former Google executive whose responsibilities include communications, is likely tougher and politically more brass-knuckled than BW understands.
As well, some of BW’s articles of late appeal more to stereotypical “dude” sensibilities than individuals looking to gain some business insight. For example, the magazine ran a cover story in February about Ashley Madison, a niche website that provides a venue for men and women looking to cheat on their spouse. The article’s only particular insight was the owner of the site purports to be the consummate family man. The magazine has also recently run articles on the “business” of cougars and lingerie football, and profiled a small 15-store lingerie chain specializing in custom-fitting bras. It’s hard to take seriously a business magazine that refers to Victoria’s Secret as the “Goldman Sachs of ladies underwear.”
I’ve long maintained that mainstream journalism’s declining influence stems from the repeated promotion of failed editors and journalists writing stories to impress each other rather than the readers they serve. Underscoring my point, Stephen Adler, the former BW editor, in February was named editor-in-chief of Thomson Reuters, an even bigger news organization. Fortunately, Mr. Adler just hired former Dow Jones executive Paul Ingrassia, one of the few business journalists with a successful leadership and management track record, to serve as his deputy.
As for Tyrangiel, if he wants BW and the impressive editorial team he oversees to garner the respect they rightfully deserve, it might behoove him to spend more time focusing on the stories truly shaping the economy and the business of business. Leave the “dude”-esque stories to publications like Maxim.
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May 16, 2011 10:04 am : Comments 000
Mainstream media, the tech trades, and the blogosphere are agog covering the story of Burson-Marsteller’s (BM) clandestine anti-Google media pitches on behalf of undisclosed client Facebook, but I’m guessing BM’s John Mercurio still doesn’t get the fuss.
During his earlier career as a political reporter, he no doubt frequently found himself on the receiving end of “you-didn’t-hear-it-from-me-but” calls from politicians, candidates, aides, lobbyists, and the like looking to plant stories that would smear the opposition. So when he jumped to the other side and entered the PR world by joining Burson-Marsteller, that’s the playbook he brought with him.
Mercurio and his colleague Jim Goldman, another newly hooked BM employee fished from the journalism sea (Goldman is a former CNBC reporter), soon learned that what works in the political world doesn’t necessarily translate to the business sector, particularly when public – or soon to be public — companies are involved. There are simply too many constituencies with a real vested interest — investors, employees, customers, analysts, vendors, and regulators, to name a few — for the usual chicanery of politics to prevail. If Mercurio and Goldman didn’t know that when they set out on their secret mission to raise privacy concerns about Google’s Social Circle, my guess is they do now.
The media’s outrage to date has focused primarily on Facebook’s hypocrisy for secretly trying to point a damning finger at Google given its own track record with user privacy transgressions. Despite founder Mark Zuckerberg’s claims that he’s all about transparency, the company is reportedly close to signing a consent decree with the Federal Trade Commission for its repeated violations. With the Burson stunt, Facebook was clearly trying to end their ignoble reign as poster child for online privacy violators by dragging Google up to the podium with them.
Despite the industry’s professional code of ethics requiring PR practitioners to reveal sponsors for represented causes and interests, it shouldn’t come as too great a surprise that Burson-Marsteller chose to violate it. While the company insists that Mercurio and Goldman breached the firm’s ethical guidelines, BM got caught doing pretty much the same thing for Microsoft two years ago with respect to Google’s planned acquisition of DoubleClick. Having a code of ethics is the easy part; expecting employees to adhere to it is something entirely different. After all, even Enron likely had a well-written code of ethics in its new employee onboarding package.
The issue of bigger concern is the inevitable adverse consequences when people from the world of politics infiltrate senior corporate communications positions, or in the case of Facebook and Burson-Marsteller, are allowed to run entire companies. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose responsibilities include overseeing communications, is a former Treasury Department Chief of Staff in the Clinton Administration. Elliot Schrage, vice president of communications, marketing, and public policy, also is a political veteran. Mark Penn, Burson’s CEO, was a close aide in the presidential campaigns of both Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“Reputation management” has a very different meaning in politics. It’s about swaying public opinion by any means necessary. Politicos and lobbyists spin and leak stories, and political reporters lap it up and keep score. The effectiveness of this constant spinning is measured in news cycles; if you are featured positively in more news cycles than not, you’re ahead. Is it any wonder that Congress and the media are routinely ranked as America’s least trusted institutions?
Accordingly, individuals steeped in politics instinctively see nothing untoward about anonymously casting doubt on a rival. I believe BM’s claim that it was Facebook that insisted it not be identified as the sponsor of the campaign against Google, but I’m highly doubtful that Sandberg and Schrage weren’t a party to the decision.
Moreover, the very cynical side of me suspects that, despite the negative press, Penn, and perhaps Sandberg and Schrage, view BM’s whisper campaign as a huge success. Yes, the disclosure that Facebook was behind the campaign is somewhat of an embarrassment but the fundamental message points have been well reported.
Sadly, the Facebook-BM-Google debacle isn’t an isolated incident of a dubious corporate PR campaign being run by a former politico. Leslie Dach, who held various positions in the Clinton Administration, was the architect of the “Wal-Marting Across America” blog. It was positioned as being penned by a couple of genuine pro-Walmart customer enthusiasts, but was really an initiative of Walmart’s PR firm. That ill-advised campaign ranks among the biggest PR blunders by a major consumer corporation. Dach launched the campaign while working at Edelman, but he’s now Walmart’s executive vice president for corporate affairs. (For more on Dach and his corporate communications activities, read this damning profile in The New Yorker.)
The financial services sector is now turning to politcos for its communications counsel. Citibank recently hired Ed Skylar, a former aide to Mayor Mike Bloomberg, as its head of public affairs, and Goldman Sachs last year retained Clinton aide Mark “Master of the Disaster” Fabiani to help clean up its image. John Thain, CEO of CIT and the former head of the NYSE, has relied on former state department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler for his communications counsel for several years.
All of these companies are in some sort of trouble, whether it be financial, competitive, or reputational. It will be interesting to see the tactics these companies use to turn themselves around.
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