Randomly Noted

The incongruity wasn’t lost on the Federal Reserve chairman or the crowd.

“But before asking the last question, a couple of very important matters to take care of,” intoned the moderator at Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s rare press conference today in Washington at the National Press Club. “Want to remind our members and guests of future speakers. Harry Shearer, the comedian and humorist, a voice of ‘The Simpsons,’ will discuss media myths on March 14.

“And we might even try to get him to do a few voices for us,” the moderator added, according to a transcript.

Continue reading…

In a development that might seem mundane, but would have been unimaginable not all that long ago, the Federal Reserve talked about the chairman hosting press conferences.

The once secretive central bank has come to this, the possibility that Chairman Ben Bernanke would expose himself to the hurly burly of questions from members of the media.  It was in the working life of this columnist that even changes in Federal Reserve monetary policy weren’t publicly announced. They were divined from market activity.

If Bernanke press conferences became a reality, some questions would be pointed. Some would be uninformed. The answers likely would stay obscure to most citizens.

Still, it’s a great idea.

There’s no guarantee the Fed will get there. In meeting minutes released Tuesday, the topic of press briefings was referenced. The subject was addressed in a video conference of Fed policy makers on Oct. 15.

All the minutes say is this: “Participants discussed whether it might be useful for the Chairman to hold occasional presss briefings to provide more detailed information to the public regarding the Committee’s assessment of the outlook and its policy decisionmaking than is included in (the) Committee’s short post-meeting statements.”

The Committeee is the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee.

This special Oct. 15 video conference was described in a phrase that would make any corporate bureaucrat proud. There was no chance for that meeting to fail to accomplish. Communications issues and the pros and cons of setting a target for a term interest rate were discussed. The quote is this: “The agenda did not contemplate any policy decisions and none were taken.”

Back to the press conference idea. They should be more frequent than simply occasional, the theoretical time frame mentioned in the minutes. The Fed is a mystery to most people. Some think such economic power in the hands of independent and unelected officials is out of step with democratic institutions. Bernanke press conferences would help demystify the Fed and make it more democratic.

Like it or not, The Fed and its policies already are fodder in the political arena. The latest bond-buying plan to stimulate the economy earned the ire of a number of Republican lawmakers. In the run-up to new financial services regulation, a Democrat-controlled Congress mulled clipping the Fed’s regulatory wings and threatened its monetary policy independence. Nothing ultimaately happened there (the Fed got increased regulatory powers).

But clearly, there have been politics surrounding the Fed on both sides of the aisle.

Press conferences could help by increasing the Fed’s standing with the public, or some interested portion of it. If you wind up in Rome, do as the Romans do. Find a lectern and state your case. Take on the questions and defend your positions. Get your sound bites distributed far and wide.

Bernanke and his like-minded colleagues have mounted a decent defense of the $600 billion Treasury securities buying plan through public appearances and in speech texts. Adding press conferences makes sense as a next step.

Interesting: the top two bosses of the New York Times Co. got big 2009 pay raises. NYT Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.’s pay more than doubled to $6 million; CEO Janet L. Robinson got $6.3 million – 32% more than a year earlier. Granted, the NYT’s share price has nearly tripled over the past year, and the top honchos got pay cuts in 2008. Then again, the bald fact is: the NYT is a troubled newspaper-focused company. It lacks the Washington Post Co.’s lucrative Stanley Kaplan education unit and Pearson’s textbook publishing business not to mention its premium-subscription financial information operations. It will be interesting to see how Sulzberger defends his payout.

The old gray lady reported financial results today and while the company heralded some signs of improvement in its press release, it remains clear that the New York Times faces some serious challenges ahead. Operating profits rose in the 4Q 10.9%. And while sales were off 11.5%, the NYT noted that decline is an improvement from the 16.9% 3Q declines from its year-ago period. So, while sales are still off, the trend line is headed in the right direction. But other numbers indicate more challenges ahead. Print ad sales were off 20% (there was an 11% rise in digital ads). The company sees advertising remaining weak in the 1Q. The company reported net income of $90.9 million. But make no mistake where a lot of that profit came from – cost cutting (production costs are down 27.1%) and freezing the pension plans. The freeze alone accounted for a $32.4 million after-tax gain. And speaking of the pension plan, it is now underfunded by about $420 million. That gap has increased from the $300 million a year ago. The company has been paying down debt and has been looking to asset sales to help on that front – it sold its classical radio station in NYC and has put the Boston Red Sox baseball team up for sale. But those are only short-term money-raising fixes.

When you see the botton line numbers at Gannett, you can’t help but think at first that maybe, just maybe, the newspaper industry has struck bottom and is starting to turn around. The company, publisher of  USA Today and other papers, says it earned 56 cents a share in the most recent quarter compared to a loss of $20.65 a share a year ago. But when you drill down, you see revenues declined 14% to $1.5 billion from $1.7 billion. A big chunk of the declines came from advertising, which fell 18% year-over-year. And the hardest hit part of advertising was one that traditionally as the steadiest – classified ad sales were down 22%.

So, once again a company was able to manage its numbers by cutting costs, not because it grew its business. Those of us who practice this craft know its a business that costs a lot to produce the kinds of products we all do. We know the value is there. Hopefully, it doesn’t take a calamity in the news business for the public to understand that value, too.

“Never complain, never explain.”

That line, attributed to Henry Ford II, son of the founder of Ford Motor Co., is advice usually taken as gospel by captains of finance and industry when their fortunes turn sour.

But recently we’ve had two former, quite prominent business leaders take different public tacks. Both left something wanting.

Continue reading…

DJN colleague Nat Worden’s story about the media industry’s renewed affection for content is worth a look. The piece, “Big Media Renew Love For Content,” notes that “the industry’s titans are coalescing around a risky gamble on the old adage, ‘content is king.’” He notes News Corp., our parent company, along with Time Warner and Walt Disney share a strategy “to produce premium media content in a bet that consumers are ready to pay for it online.” It’s risky, sure, but it’s the only way forward for content producers – and, frankly, for readers who cherish the type of news and non-news content which costs money to produce. I also think it’s not as risky as some may think. As the economy recovers, and as CEOs such as Rupert Murdoch speak out publicly and often about the perils of giving away valuable content, customers will increasingly accept that it comes with a price.

Colleague Maria Abi-Habib reports that the Gulf News has told reporters to avoid using the terms “default” and “bailout” when reporting on Dubai default and bailout news. Gulf News is the biggest English-language daily in the United Arab Emirates. The paper’s ban – characterized as a “style guide” by its editor-at-large – comes as Dubai’s pooh-bahs have taken to rhetorically flogging (and in one case, confiscating) the international press for problems of their own creation.  It’s a sign of moral decay that should give those considering investing in Dubai’s beaten-down assets a great deal of pause.

The only thing slightly dilutive to the embarassment that accrues from realizing I have become way too attached to my BlackBerry device is the firm knowledge I am not alone.

I am confident I am not the only person in the Americas Tuesday night, who upon noticing a too-long delay between receipt of emails, started monkeying with the instrument with increasing amounts of frustration and despair.

I am confident I am not the only person who shut the instrument off, took out the battery, and, when the thing still wouldn’t work, again carried out both procedure. I did eventually go to sleep. No messages from about 730 pm to 230 am U.S. eastern time.

Research in Motion, the company behind BlackBerry, apologized today to users for the email outage, citing technical factors.

As discouraging to the company as no doubt such outages are, they do perversely prove the loyalty and dependence of the customer base. Not bad things for a business.

Perhaps only journalists of a certain age – and the few remaining employees - will mourn the loss of the magazine Editor & Publisher.

Nielson Co. said it would close the magazine whose job was to chronicle the newspaper industry. It lasted some 100 years, no small feat. The “creative destruction” of the news business continues.

To those of us in the U.S. eager to begin careers in journalism in the late 1970s and certainly for some years past that, Editor & Publisher magazine, and its companion annual yearbook, served as the road map.

Continue reading…