The Panic of '08: Rating The Media Winners (And Losers) - Gawker

Although the business media can't sell any ads during an economic meltdown like the one we're having now, it sure is a great chance for reporters to make names for themselves. Business reporters absolutely live for the periodic destruction of the American economy. This is their Normandy! After the jump, we survey the media landscape and pick out the winners and losers—all your favorites, from Paul Krugman to Jim Cramer, ranked on a merciless 10-point scale!
[Ratings are on a 1-10 scale—with 10 being the best—and are based on how much the media person or outlet has benefited from the crisis, how right they've been, and how much influence they've had.]

WINNERS

Paul Krugman, NYT: Yea, he just won the Nobel Prize, okay? [10]

Robert Thomson, WSJ: Thomson led the WSJ's recent redesign and re-imagination—which proved perfect for the big, scary headlines necessary over the last month. [9]

Joe Nocera, NYT, and Bethany McLean, Fortune: Scored roughly a million-dollar deal to write the "definitive" book about the crisis. These two are certainly qualified to do it, but still—lucky bastards. [9]

Maria Bartiromo, CNBC: The Money Honey is still the public face of CNBC, which owned this crisis top to bottom. [8]

Lionel Barber, FT: Editor of the paper that's been consistently serious enough for long enough not to make anyone wonder about its political motives when the crisis went down. [8]

Andrew Ross Sorkin, NYT: Wunderkind M&A reporter and Dealbook chief who is just everywhere. He got a shitload of money for a book. [8]

Steve Liesman, CNBC: Senior economic reporter, and a man who's been getting way more face time with Wall Street big shots lately than their wives have. [8]

John Gapper, FT: Chief business commentator at the solid pink paper, he's been admirably hard on the villains. [7]

Charlie Rose, PBS: Landed a big interview with Warren Buffett—the last investor anybody trusts. [7]

John Carney, Clusterstock: He left Dealbreaker in the midst of all this as possibly the most visible young, bloggin', new media name who actually knows what the hell is going on. [7]

Felix Salmon, Portfolio: He's one of the better finance bloggers and has managed to stay on top of the crisis consistently, when not working on 12,000 word analyses of the Gawker pay structure. [6]

Daniel Gross, Newsweek: Maybe smartest of all, plans a "quickie electronic book" to be published before the end of the year. Do less work, get out first, heyo! [6]

LOSERS

Fox Business Network: Yes, the little network finally got a measurable audience because of the crisis, and yes, they go to throw some decent shots at Jim Cramer. But the comparison to CNBC just makes them look bad. [4]

Charlie Gasparino, CNBC: Got a lot of airtime as a talking head, which is good for him. Was working on a book about reckless leaders at Wall Street firms like Bear Stearns before Bear Stearns collapsed, which could mean a lot of pain in the ass rewriting. Comes off as a bit of wingnut by trying to pin the whole meltdown on Obama. [4]

Andrea Mitchell, NBC: Trying to report while being married to Alan Greenspan, one of the guys most responsible for this whole thing. Ha. Time to retire, maybe? [3]

Book Publishers: Who's going to buy all these books? [2]

Jim Cramer, CNBC: Gave intermittently terrible advice, then made it worse when he tried to correct it. Overly emotional, which is not the thing people want in a money manager. See a roundup of his whole weird year here. [1]

COMMENTS (IW - as ever with Gawker, their comments often interesting)

The Doctor 4:30 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Those are some moneymakers I have no interest in seeing shake.

The Doctor Those are some moneymakers I have no interest in seeing...


4:52 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008 1 reply
Spirit Fingers 4:52 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Can we put Suze Orman in the loser pile? I don't know what she's said over the last few weeks, but the orange skin is appalling.

Spirit Fingers Can we put Suze Orman in the loser pile? I don't know...
1 reply by SaraRueful

SaraRueful 5:13 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
@Spirit Fingers: I hate her creepy zombie eyes. When I was commuting on Metro-North I switched seats once because her poster was right in front of me. {shudders}

SaraRueful @ Spirit Fingers : I hate her creepy zombie eyes. When I...


4:52 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008 3 replies
Cannot Find Server 4:52 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
NPR's been knocking it out of the park too. The "This American Life" that explained everything two weeks ago (entitled, aptly, "Another Frightening Show About the Economy") was clear-headed, full of common sense, and completely free of shouty nonsense. I knew nothing before that show, now I understand most of this crisis.
Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg deserve an award for their work on that show alone.

Cannot Find Server NPR's been knocking it out of the park too. The "This...
3 replies by mfnher, encnyc, La Mareada

mfnher 4:58 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
@Cannot Find Server: I don't know if that was the same one they did on the mortgage crisis. I think the one your mentioning is the follow up. Either way, they're both great. I work in the industry and whenever my friends ask me what's going on, I just tell them to download the This American Life episodes.

mfnher @ Cannot Find Server : I don't know if that was the same...

encnyc 6:06 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
@Cannot Find Server: If netting didnt scare the hell out of you, nothing will. Totally agree that NPR, especially via This American Life, has done the best reporting on the financial meltdown by calmly explaining the insanity that was its cause.

encnyc @ Cannot Find Server : If netting didnt scare the hell...

La Mareada 6:13 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
@Cannot Find Server: Davidson & Blumberg have a daily podcast called Planet Money so you can be more scared and smarter than anybody else everyday.

La Mareada @ Cannot Find Server : Davidson & Blumberg have a...


4:55 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Phyllis Nefler 4:55 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
John Carney also kicks a hell of a field goal for YOUR SUPER BOWL CHAMPION NEW. YORK. GIANTS!
Oh and he's running for office in Delaware too.

Phyllis Nefler John Carney also kicks a hell of a field goal for YOUR...


5:53 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Felix 5:53 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
It was 5,000 words, tops.

Felix It was 5,000 words, tops.


6:04 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
ZiggyStardust 6:04 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Hamilton-- Ben White moving from the Financial Times to the New York Times-- and racking up gobs of front-pagers should make him a winner as well.
Ditto WaPo's Steve Pearlstein, WSJ's Dave Enrich, Robin Sidel and Damian Paletta, the American Banker staff (who have been pounding the pavement hard) and a number of others...

ZiggyStardust Hamilton-- Ben White moving from the Financial Times to...


6:16 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Dave J. 6:16 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Larry Kudlow should be on the losers list, just basically because he's a huge loser who really sucks.

Dave J. Larry Kudlow should be on the losers list, just...


10:19 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
david 10:19 PM on Wed Oct 15 2008
Don't forget Yves Smith at Nakedcapitalism, most relentless high quality coverage of the carnage so far.

david Don't forget Yves Smith at Nakedcapitalism, most...


12:47 AM
missdelite 12:47 AM
I learned alot from CNN's Glenn Beck Show.

missdelite I learned alot from CNN's Glenn Beck Show.


10:27 AM
Monte Wooley 10:27 AM
"Roughly a million dollar deal?" So let's say it's really 800K, less commission, leaving 680K, less taxes, leaving 350K, and finally split in half, so that's 175K each. Those are blog-book numbers, my dear. Harumph.

Monte Wooley "Roughly a million dollar deal?" So let's say it's...

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Conflict of Interest: NYT's coverage of Krugman Nobel Prize

I'm very happy for Krugman, I'm a big fan of his but I can't help but wonder whether the NYT/IHT needs to be offering some non-NYTMG analysis of their star Op-ed writer (whose contract is now going to be rather more expensive in 2009 is my guess: add that to newsroom budget changes).

In bold below, I've put what could be characterised as criticism of either Krugman or him being awared the Nobel, to give a sense of proportion and balance here.

Krugman wins Nobel in economics
By Catherine Rampell
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science on Monday.
The prize committee cited Krugman for "having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity."
Krugman, 55, is probably more widely known for his Op-Ed columns in which he has been a perpetual thorn in George Bush's (and now John McCain's) side. His columns have won him both strong supporters and ardent critics.
The Nobel, however, was awarded for the academic, and less political, research that he conducted primarily before he began writing regularly for The Times.
"To be absolutely, totally honest, I thought this day might come someday, but I was absolutely convinced it wasn't going to be this day," Krugman said in an interview on Monday. "I know people who live their lives waiting for this call, and it's not good for the soul. So I put it out of my mind and stopped thinking about it."
Krugman won the prize for his research, beginning in 1979, that explained patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why.
Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and will exchange only the kinds of goods that they are comparatively better at producing, wine from France, for example, and rice from China. This model, however, dating from the early 19th century, was not reflected in the flow of goods and services Krugman saw in the world around him. He set out to explain why worldwide trade was dominated by a few countries that were similar to each other, and why a country might import the same kinds of goods it exported.
In his model, many companies sell similar goods with slight variations. These companies get more efficient at producing their goods as they sell more, and so they grow. Consumers like variety, and pick and choose goods from among these producers in different countries, enabling countries to continue exchanging similar products. So some Americans buy Volkswagens and some Germans buy Fords.
He developed this work further to explain the effect of transportation costs on why people live where they live. His model explained under what conditions trade would lead people or companies to move to a particular region or to move away.
Krugman's work has been praised for its simplicity and practicality, features economists are often criticized for ignoring.
"Some people think that something deep only comes out of great complexity," said Maurice Obstfeld, an economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley who co-authored a textbook on international economics with Krugman. "Paul's great strength is to take something very simple and make something new and very profound."
Krugman applied his skill at translating complex ideas into clear, entertaining prose to his Times columns, which he began writing in 1999. In recent years, in his column and a related blog on nytimes.com, nearly everything about the Bush administration, from health care policy to Iraq to "general incompetence", has been the object of his scorn.
Along the way, Krugman has come in for criticism himself from both economists and lay readers.
"Much of his popular work is disgraceful," said Daniel Klein, a professor of economics at George Mason University who earlier this year wrote a comprehensive review of Krugman's body of Times columns. "He totally omits all these major issues where the economics conclusion goes against the feel-good Democratic Party ethos, which I think he's really tended to pander to especially since writing for The New York Times."
But he has equally fervent fans of his popular work.
"I praise today's prize as being deserving and even overdue, but more than that I reproach the Pulitzer committee, which owed him at least a couple of prizes in the past," said Paul Samuelson, a previous winner of the Nobel prize in economics. "Paul Krugman is the only columnist in the United States who has had it right on almost every count from the beginning."
Krugman said he did not expect his award to have much effect on how colleagues and his popular readership,whether they be friends or foes, regard him.
"For economists, this is a validation but not news," he said. "We know what each other has been up to."
"For readers of the column," he added, "maybe they will read a little more carefully when I'm being economistic, or maybe have a little more tolerance when I'm being boring."
He said he did not expect the prize to silence his critics, given the treatment of another outspoken laureate, the 2001 winner Joseph Stiglitz.
"I haven't noticed him getting an easy time," Krugman said. "People just say, 'Sure, he's a great Nobel laureate and he's very smart, but he still doesn't know what he's talking about in this situation.' I'm sure I'll get the same thing."
Krugman first gained a popular following while writing about economics for Slate Magazine in the 1990s. He frequently weighed in on contemporary free trade debates related to his research.
"He was appalled by the monster he created," said Michael Kinsley, the founding editor of Slate who hired Krugman. "He'd come up with this theory about why sometimes free trade wasn't the best policy, and suddenly everyone was citing it as an argument against free trade, while he thinks it applies once in a blue moon."
While Krugman's popular writing is now more politics-focused and his research more concentrated on international finance, he has occasionally returned to his interest in trade. In the last year he has written several times about the negative results of free trade, both in his column and in a paper he wrote for the Brookings Institution about whether trade with poor countries increases inequality within developed nations like the United States.
In 1991 Krugman received the John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to "that economist under forty who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge." He follows a long list of Clark medal recipients who have gone on to win a Nobel, including Stiglitz and Samuelson.
Krugman, who grew up on Long Island and has a bachelor's degree from Yale and a doctorate from MIT, has been teaching at Princeton since 2000. This semester, he is teaching a graduate-level course in international monetary theory and policy. He often teaches all-freshman seminars on issues related to economics.
Krugman joins another Princeton economist, albeit one of different ideological leanings, who is in the news recently: Ben Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve who, coincidentally, offered Krugman his Princeton post. Bernanke and Krugman were fellow grad students at MIT in the 1970s. Their era at MIT produced several other economists who went onto prestigious careers in public policy, including Olivier Blanchard and Kenneth Rogoff, the current and former chief economists at the International Monetary Fund.
Monday's award, the last of the six prizes, is not one of the original Nobels. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel's memory. Krugman was the sole winner of the award this year, which includes a prize of about $1.4 million.
Still, his collaborators and mentors in his international trade research, some of whom were considered competing candidates for the prize, extended their praise.
"Lots of people are saying to me, 'Why didn't you get it?'" said Jagdish Bhagwati, an economics professor at Columbia University who helped Krugman publish one of his seminal papers when other academics thought it was too simple to be true. "Given the fact that I didn't get it, this is the next best thing."

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Paul Krugman wins Nobel Prize for economics (AP)

6 hours ago
STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) — American Paul Krugman won the Nobel economics prize on Monday for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity.
Krugman, born in 1953, and a professor at Princeton University in New Jersey and a columnist for The New York Times, formulated a new theory to answer questions about free trade, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said.
"What are the effects of free trade and globalization? What are the driving forces behind worldwide urbanization? Paul Krugman has formulated a new theory to answer these questions," the academy said in its citation.
"He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography," it said.
Krugman was the lone of winner of the 10 million kronor (US$1.4 million) award, the latest in a string of American researchers to be honored.
The award, known as the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, is the last of the six Nobel prizes announced this year and is not one of the original Nobels. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Nobel's memory.

October 14, 2008, NYTimes
Krugman Wins Economics Nobel
By CATHERINE RAMPELL
Paul Krugman, a professor at Princeton University and an Op-Ed page columnist for The New York Times, was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences on Monday.
“It’s been an extremely weird day, but weird in a positive way,” Mr. Krugman said in an interview on his way to a Washington meeting for the Group of 30, an international body from the public and private sectors that discusses international economics. He said he was mostly “preoccupied with the hassles” of trying to make all his scheduled meetings on Monday and answer a constantly ringing cellphone.
Mr. Krugman received the award for his work on international trade and economic geography. In particular, the prize committee lauded his work for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.”
He has developed models that explain observed patterns of trade between countries, as well as what goods are produced where and why. Traditional trade theory assumes that countries are different and will exchange different kinds of goods; Mr. Krugman’s theories have explained why worldwide trade is dominated by a few countries that are similar to each other, and why some countries might import the same kinds of goods that it exports.
“There was something very beautiful about the old existing trade theory and its ability to capture the world in a surprisingly simple conceptual framework,” Mr. Krugman said. “And then I realized that some of the new insights coming through in industrial organization could be applied to international trade.”
Mr. Krugman wrote his dissertation, however, on international finance, and credits his professor at M.I.T., Rudiger Dornbusch, with pushing him to study international trade.
“I went to visit him one snowy day in early 1978 and described to him what I’d been thinking about,” Mr. Krugman said. “He turned to me and said, ‘You’ve got to write about that.’ ”
Mr. Krugman has been an Op-Ed columnist at The New York Times since 1999.
“For economists, this is a validation but not news. We know what each other have been up to,” Mr. Krugman said. “For readers of the column, maybe they will read a little more carefully when I’m being economistic, or maybe have a little more tolerance when I’m being boring.”
He said that he did not expect his critics to let him off any more easily because of his new accolade, though.
“I think we’ve learned this when we see Joe Stiglitz writing,” Mr. Krugman said, referring to the winner of the economics Nobel in 2001. “I haven’t noticed him getting an easy time. People just say, ‘Sure, he’s a great Nobel laureate and he’s very smart, but he still doesn’t know what he’s talking about in this situation.’ I’m sure I’ll get the same thing.”
In 1991 Mr. Krugman received the John Bates Clark medal, a prize given every two years to “that economist under 40 who is adjudged to have made a significant contribution to economic knowledge.” He follows several Clark medal recipients who have gone on to win a Nobel, including Mr. Stiglitz.
“To be absolutely, totally honest I thought this day might come someday, but I was absolutely convinced it wasn’t going to be this day,” Mr. Krugman said. “I know people who live their lives waiting for this call, and it’s not good for the soul. So I put it out of my mind and stopped thinking about it.”
He said he did not participate in any of the economics Nobel betting pools , and that he did not know which day the winner’s name would be released until a colleague told him last week.
Mr. Krugman continues to teach at Princeton. This semester he is teaching a small graduate-level course on international monetary policy and theory, covering such timely subjects as international liquidity crises. In recent years he has also taught courses on the welfare state and international trade, as well as all-freshman seminars on various economic topics.
Monday’s award, the last of the six prizes, is not one of the original Nobels. It was created in 1968 by the Swedish central bank in Alfred Nobel’s memory. Mr. Krugman was the sole winner of the award this year, which includes a prize of about $1.4 million.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/14/business/economy/14econ.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=slogin&pagewanted=print

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