April 24, 2024

You are here: Home / Archives for newsroom

Privacy Breach on Bloomberg’s Data Terminals

May 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The company confirmed that reporters at Bloomberg News, the journalism arm of Bloomberg L.P., had for years used the company’s terminals to monitor when subscribers had logged onto the service and to find out what types of functions, like the news wire, corporate bond trades or an equities index, they had looked at. Bloomberg terminals, which cost an average of more than $20,000 a year, are found in nearly every banking and trading company.

Bloomberg said the functions that allowed journalists to monitor subscribers were a mistake and were promptly disabled after Goldman Sachs complained that a Bloomberg reporter had, while inquiring about a partner’s employment status, pointed out that the partner had not logged onto his Bloomberg terminal lately.

The incident led to broader concerns about the line at Bloomberg between its lucrative terminal business and the hypercompetitive newsroom, threatening to undermine the credibility of both. In a secretive world that thrives on opacity, traders and financial firms jealously guard every speck of information about their activity to avoid tipping their hand on their trades and investments.

“On Wall Street, anonymity is critically important. Secrecy and the ability to cover one’s tracks is paramount,” said Michael J. Driscoll, a former senior trader at Bear Stearns who now teaches at Adelphi University. He added: “If Bloomberg reporters crossed that line, that’s an issue.”

The news gathering technique appears more widespread than the Goldman incident, which was first reported by The New York Post. A preliminary analysis at Bloomberg revealed that “several hundred” reporters had used the technique, a person briefed on the analysis said. (Bloomberg employs more than 2,400 journalists worldwide. A spokesman declined to comment on the analysis and said no reporters had been fired.)

There are also fears that the monitoring may have gone beyond Wall Street. Banking regulators at the Federal Reserve are examining whether their own employees were subject to tracking by Bloomberg reporters, according to people briefed on the matter. A spokeswoman for the Fed declined to comment.

There are now more than 315,000 Bloomberg terminal subscribers worldwide who rely on the desktop computer for research, trading, communication and a constant stream of financial information and news.

But as it turned out, what the subscribers were doing was not always confidential. Bloomberg reporters used the “Z function” — a command using the letter Z and a company’s name — to view a list of subscribers at a firm. Then, a Bloomberg user could click on a subscriber’s name, which would take the user to a function called UUID. The UUID function then provided background on an individual subscriber, including contact information, when the subscriber had last logged on, chat information between subscribers and customer service representatives, and weekly statistics on how often they used a particular function. A company spokesman said both of those functions had been disabled in the newsroom.

Terminals never allowed journalists to see specific securities or trades, but even general hints of what users are searching could provide a glimpse into Wall Street’s thinking — powerful currency in the competitive world of financial journalism. Daniel L. Doctoroff, chief executive of Bloomberg L.P. and a close confidant to the company’s founder, Michael R. Bloomberg, said in a memo to employees that “client trust is our highest priority and the cornerstone of our business.” Mr. Bloomberg stepped away from day-to-day operations when he became mayor of New York City.

Last month, the company further centralized its data security efforts, including appointing Steve Ross, a senior executive, to the newly created role of client data compliance officer.

“To be clear, the limited customer relationship data previously available to our reporters never included access to our trading, portfolio, monitor, blotter or other related systems or our clients’ messages,” Mr. Doctoroff said. He posted a damage control message to clients on the Bloomberg terminal and blog, calling the reporting practice a “mistake.”

Nathaniel Popper contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/11/business/media/privacy-breach-on-bloombergs-data-terminals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

‘Lucky Guy’ by Nora Ephron as Recalled by Jim Dwyer

March 30, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Also, me, a member of the standing army of columnists.

Down the right side of the page was the customary list of the actors playing them  — well, playing us — starting with Tom Hanks, cast in his Broadway debut as McAlary, the subject of the late Nora Ephron’s new play, “Lucky Guy.” 

Curtain up.

The newsmen are standing at a bar, bellowing “The Wild Rover,” the Irish ballad. 

For an instant, I wonder: Who were these people with our names and why were they singing those songs? This must have been what the von Trapp family felt when they saw “The Sound of Music.” 

Then the action moved to the familiar racket of a newsroom. An editor yelling at a tardy writer that this was a daily, not a weekly paper; one reporter ducking an assignment, another one running harder, staying later and getting the best story. Icarus was cleared for take off. 

On four March evenings in the tranquil New York of 2013, I sat in the Broadhurst Theater watching previews of “Lucky Guy,” a show set 25 years ago in the raucous, ragged city of 1988 about a friend who died young. 

It took a couple of performances for me to lose the hazy filter of actuality — to get over myself and the people I knew, even though it is well-known that hardly anyone is more entertaining than journalists, certainly not to other journalists — and to recognize something besides the names. This was reality, sampled, with the pathos and comic folly remixed. The guts of it had stayed true, thrillingly so, to the life I had witnessed.

That was one more surprise to savor after 14 years of knowing about “Lucky Guy,” before that was its name, or it was a play, or it seemed at all likely.

IF MEMORY SERVES, sometime around March 1999 a caller to The Daily News introduced herself as Nora Ephron, and how about dinner?

She was thinking that the life and death of Mike McAlary would make a film. Ephron told me that she couldn’t remember ever meeting him, but that she had read the obituaries a few months earlier, after his death at 41 on Christmas Day 1998. Seen from a distance, the contrails of his life were the stuff of myths. 

 Fueled by high-octane swagger, McAlary had been a star columnist at the city tabloids for a decade, specializing in police corruption and police heroics. Near the end he fell spectacularly on his face and was written off, prematurely and in some circles, gleefully, as a sloppy, self-aggrandizing hack. Terminally ill, he bolted his own chemotherapy session one summer morning to sneak into the hospital room of Abner Louima, who had been grotesquely tortured with a plunger by police officers. A few months before he died, McAlary was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for the columns that made the case a national scandal.

What Ephron needed from me, and others, were not bold-type headlines, but brush strokes. There were things I couldn’t be much help on. McAlary and I were not bar buddies — he was a night life Olympian — and for most of the decade, we worked at different papers. But we were the same age, both writing columns three times a week and we spoke almost every day to help each other feed the column furnace, swapping names, phone numbers, angles.

He began practically every conversation not with hello, but by announcing, “This is good for us.”

What was? Almost anything. 

If we turned up on opposite sides of some issue — let’s say that McAlary wrote that the police commissioner was a bum, and my column crowned him a prince — he would call early. 

“This is good for us!” he’d say. “If they push him out, I’ll have the new guy. You’ll get leaks from the empire in exile, which is even better.”

At our dinner in 1999, Ephron did not touch her food. She had insisted that I order the veal chop, a bit bossy considering that we’d only met 90 seconds earlier.

She kept taking notes as I passed along McAlary lore.

Jim Dwyer, now at The New York Times, wrote columns in New York Newsday and The Daily News from 1986 to 2001. 

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/31/theater/lucky-guy-by-nora-ephron-as-recalled-by-jim-dwyer.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Media Decoder Blog: Times Communications Executive Is Leaving

January 17, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Robert Christie, senior vice president of corporate communications for The New York Times Company, is leaving the company and his position is being eliminated, The Times announced Wednesday.

In a memo to the staff Mark Thompson, the company’s chief executive, credited Mr. Christie with building up the Times’s communications team, one he said would “continue to serve The New York Times Company after Bob leaves.” He added that Eileen Murphy, vice president of corporate communications, will now lead the department.

“Bob’s extensive experience and broad range of contacts in the industry have been very valuable over the past three years,” Mr. Thompson wrote.

Mr. Christie, who joined The Times from The Wall Street Journal in 2010, is part of a series of layoffs and buyouts that have been taking place at the company in recent months. In December, Scott Heekin-Canedy, another senior executive, retired, and the company said it would eliminate his position. In December, The Times started to offer buyout packages to 30 members of the newsroom who do not belong to the Guild. Employees volunteering to take these buyouts must accept them by next week.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/16/times-communications-executive-is-leaving/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,

Chinese Officials Pledge to Loosen Controls Over Embattled Newspaper

January 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The agreement was part of a compromise in which reporters and editors who had said they would strike continued to work to put out the newspaper, Southern Weekend, also known as Southern Weekly, which is published on Thursdays. It is an iconic liberal publication that has regularly challenged Communist Party officials and policies but has come under tighter control in recent years, particularly since the summer.

In Beijing, talk of another newsroom in crisis emerged on Wednesday as reporters at Beijing News, a newspaper co-founded by the parent company of Southern Weekend, said propaganda officials forced the newspaper, against the judgment of its publisher and top editors, to run an editorial attacking Southern Weekend. Some journalists broke down in tears in the newsroom, according to various accounts, and the publisher, Dai Zigeng, threatened to resign, but was still in his job as of Wednesday night.

The deal in Guangzhou, the provincial capital, appeared to bring a tentative peace to a newsroom in turmoil, though journalists said they would have to see whether provincial officials followed through with their promises. The journalists appeared to back down from their demands that the top provincial propaganda official, Tuo Zhen, leave his post. Newspaper employees have accused Mr. Tuo of putting in place much stricter censorship rules since he began his job in May; in particular, they said he had a hand in the rewriting of a New Year’s editorial last week that was supposed to have been a call for enforcement of constitutional rights but ended up being more of a paean to the current system. It is unclear what role Mr. Tuo played in the changes, which ignited the call last weekend among some journalists to carry out a strike.

Journalists at Southern Weekend said that under rules imposed by Mr. Tuo, propaganda officials regularly reviewed the content of the paper before it went to print and vetted reporting topics proposed by journalists. Those rules are supposed to be abolished under the new agreement.

Zeng Li, a veteran journalist who reviews articles in-house at Southern Weekend to guard against riling the censors, said, “Now things are calming down.”

“To publish a good paper is the hope of both the leaders and the staff,” he added.

Hu Chunhua, the new party chief of Guangdong, China’s most liberal province, helped mediate the settlement, which took shape late Tuesday, journalists said. The clash over censorship is the first big test for Mr. Hu, 49, who is considered one of the party’s rising stars and a candidate to be the leader of China in a decade.

The battle at Southern Weekend also poses a challenge for the central authorities. Xi Jinping, the new party chief, made a trip to Guangdong late last year to stress the need to further open the economy. Analysts have wondered whether he might also call for greater political freedoms. Mr. Xi has made remarks, though, that underscore the need for China to remain true to its socialist roots.

Central propaganda officials appear to have taken a tough line on the censorship issue by demanding this week that the biggest news Web sites and some important publications print a scathing editorial criticizing Southern Weekend that was originally published by Global Times, a populist newspaper, and widely derided by Chinese journalists. The order to run the editorial led to the crisis at Beijing News on Tuesday night.

One journalist described the scene in the office in a blog post: “Some people look sad; some burst into tears; some shout that they are going to quit; some look serious.”

The post continued: “We don’t want to kneel down, but our knees have been shattered. We are kneeling down this one time while gnashing our teeth.”

The despondent journalists stayed in the office past 3 a.m. and tried to dispel their sorrow by drinking alcohol, the post said.

Beijing News has a reputation for serious investigative journalism. Its first editor in chief was Cheng Yizhong, a muckraking journalist who also ran Southern Metropolis Daily, which, like Southern Weekend, is owned by the Nanfang Media Group. Beijing News was brought under the direct management of the Beijing party propaganda office in 2011, in a clear a sign that senior officials were displeased with the newspaper’s reporting.

One senior reporter at the newspaper said that some propaganda officials visited the office on Wednesday morning, but that no personnel changes had taken place.

In Guangzhou, a third day of protests continued Wednesday outside the headquarters of the Nanfang Media Group, with about a dozen Communist Party supporters waving red banners, Chinese flags and Mao Zedong portraits confronting advocates of free speech, some of whom denounced Communist rule.

It was unclear what would happen to Huang Can, the editor in chief of Southern Weekend, who is a party official and considered an ally of the propaganda bureau. Journalists said Mr. Huang had forced a newspaper employee to give up a password to the publication’s microblog so Mr. Huang could put out a statement that the New Year’s editorial had been written by the editors.

If propaganda officials abdicate their power to review articles and reporting topics at Southern Weekend, that duty would probably fall to Zhang Dongming, president of Nanfang Media Group. Mr. Zhang is a party loyalist and was once head of the provincial propaganda department’s news division. Starting in late 2002, Mr. Zhang helped suppress reporting on the outbreak of SARS in Guangdong, and just months later he was installed in the media group during an editorial reshuffle.

One senior editor at Southern Weekend, Yan Lieshan, said in a telephone interview that the outcome of the negotiations might seem tentative, but journalists did not want to back senior party officials into a corner.

“Xi Jinping has begun by showing good intentions and creating an atmosphere of reform,” he said. “So we don’t want to push the leadership to the point where they have no room left to act. We at Southern Weekend want a result that both sides can accept.”

Edward Wong reported from Guangzhou, and Jonathan Ansfield from Beijing. Mia Li contributed research from Guangzhou, and Shi Da from Beijing.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/10/world/asia/chinese-officials-pledge-to-loosen-controls-over-embattled-newspaper.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

Filed Under: Media Business Tagged With: , ,