Market Talk

Hey yahoos, get away from the journalism equipment.

Dave Benoit, a reporter here at the wires, yesterday said to me casually, See that new Yahoo column? The Upshot?”

The Upshot? The Upshot!?

True it is. Yahoo has a new feature, The Upshot, which is apparently nothing more than a glorified news aggregator. Some little team of “reporters” and “editors” somewhere surfs the web and reposts other outlets’ stories. You know, so you don’t have to go through the drudgery of reading the news.

“Our goal is to be blunt narrators of the day’s news, to cut through the noise and misinformation and get to the heart of what’s important and why,” editor Andrew Golis wrote in the introductory post.

So let me be a blunt narrator, Andrew.

We write The Upshot.

We write The Upshot.

We write The Upshot.

“The Upshot” is the name of the corporate earnings-focused column John and I have been writing for the Wall Street Journal. We’ve been using that name since January, after sending the name to our corporate offices, who had to make sure nobody else was using it. (The column was initially called “The Wrap,” but we didn’t like that. But that’s another story.) So listen up, you yahoos: “The Upshot” is ours. We got there first. It’s bad enough you’re stealing other people’s news, you don’t also have to steal our name.

Go find another name, you hacks. Call it “News Rehash.” Or maybe “Yahoo’s News Aggregator.” I think “News You Can Get Elsewhere But Which We’ve Put Here In An Attempt To Siphon Off Ad Revenue For Ourselves” is quite catchy.

But “The Upshot” is taken. You will be hearing from our lawyers.