NewsTrust - All Rated Stories

Google Voice, AT&T, and the FCC: Fighting Over the Wrong Thing

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Stephen Wildstrom - Oct. 11 (Special Report) - What do Google Voice, AT&T, sex chat lines, and New Deal efforts to provide rural telephone service have do do with each other? Quite a bit, it turns out; the seemingly unrelated issues of sex chat and rural phone service lie at the heart of the

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The Mindset of an AIG executive

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Diane Brady - Mar. 25 (News Analysis) - A few things struck me in the “resignation letter” of Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit. (People don’t normally forward their letters of resignation to The New York Times) First, of course, is his justified sense of outrage at having been abandoned by his boss, AIG chief Ed Liddy, before Congress and at having his bonus essentially taken away. “Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.” But a few other sentences stand out in my mind as emblematic of the mindset that has created some of this mess.

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Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity

Sun, 22 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

TruthOut - By Shoshana Zuboff - Mar. 22 (Opinion) - The economic crisis is not the Holocaust but, I would argue, it derives from a business model that routinely produced a similar kind of remoteness and thoughtlessness, compounded by a widespread abrogation of individual moral judgment. As we learn more about the behavior within our financial institutions, we see that just about everyone accepted a reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility for the consequences of those transactions. Bankers, brokers, and financial specialists were all willing participants in a self-centered business model that celebrates what's good for organization insiders while dehumanizing and distancing everyone else - the outsiders.

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Behind the Incredibly Shrinking Media

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Paul Armstrong - Mar. 11 (Comment) - What changed? What went wrong? Nothing. The audience's attention capacity has not shrunk, but the demands on it did — exponentially.... This "new world" brought us massive amounts of information but no new time to digest it, so we cognitively economize and focus on what's required.

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High Hurdles for Obama's Green Stimulus

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By John Carey - Dec. 31 (Special Report) - The scent of fast money in Washington has all manner of corporate interests scrambling to show they can create jobs, especially green ones.

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Online Journalism: Donations Accepted

Thu, 25 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Douglas MacMillan - Dec. 25 (Special Report) - A growing number of entrepreneurs and journalism advocates around the country are experimenting with a new type of business model for news: community-funded online journalism.

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Zell's Tribune: The Canary in a Scary Mine

Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Jon Fine - Dec. 10 (News Analysis) - For the foreseeable future, Tribune will remain intact (apart from selling the Cubs baseball franchise). Perversely enough, it helps that there's apparently no one willing to offer knockout prices for key assets, and that those assets are declining in value so quickly no one is sure what many of them are worth. If the businesses and deal markets were robust, lenders would be salivating at the thought of breaking up the company. The sheer complexity of the bankruptcy—an $8.2 billion deal requires a lot of lenders—argues for a short-term status quo as well.

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Why America Needs an Economic Strategy

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Michael E. Porter - Nov. 02 (Special Report) - The stark truth is that the U.S. has no long-term economic strategy—no coherent set of policies to ensure competitiveness over the long haul. Strategy embodies clear priorities, based on understanding the strengths we need to preserve and the weaknesses that threaten our prosperity the most. Strategy addresses what to do, but also what not to do. In dealing with a crisis, experience teaches us that steps to address the immediate problem must support a long-term strategy. Yet it is far from clear that we are taking the steps most important to America's long-term economic prosperity.

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The Dirty Truth About Clean Coal

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Ben Elgin - Jun. 26 (Special Report) - Get ready for the selling of "clean coal." A $40 million industry-sponsored marketing and lobbying campaign has launched, with one national television spot featuring a farmer, a teacher, and a woman in a white lab coat declaring: "I believe"--while a voiceover describes how coal can be burned in an environmentally friendly manner.

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McCain Doubling Down On Military Service

Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By David Kiley - Jun. 06 (Opinion) - John McCain has begun to respond to Democratic attacks that he a candidate more about war than peace. This new ad, titled: "Safe," includes biography about the McCain family's long military service, including the Senator's own five year captivity. It seems a bit odd to spend 30 seconds talking about military service to try and make the point that "I hate war." But the emphasis on military service is aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton supporters who said they would not vote for Barack Obama. Those voters are overwhelmingly white, working-class men with whom the McCain campaign believes the candidate's military service and family tradition will resonate. It's a risky creative strategy. I would like to see McCain delivering the same message, while, perhaps, walking with a playground of children in the background. The message of the ad is that McCain will keep us safe. But the emphasis on military service feels out of step at a time when it is being proven that the country with the biggest army and the most bombs and tanks doesn't necessarily win in 21st century. Talking about military service experience in a vacuum, staring statically into the camera, doesn't quite make the point.

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Google's Orkut: A World of Ambition

Sun, 18 May 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Olga Kharif - May. 18 (News Report) - Seizing on Orkut's momentum in Asia and Latin America, Google moves to revamp its social networking site and take aim at Facebook and MySpace

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What You Don't Know about NAFTA

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Pete Engardio, Geri Smith, Jane Sasseen - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - ... the world has changed so profoundly since 1994 that trying to pin specific job losses and gains directly on Nafta is an exercise in futility. Myriad free-trade deals, from bilateral pacts to the World Trade Organization, have been struck since. Nations in Asia, Latin America, and Central Europe have opened up to foreign investment and have deregulated local industries. China has emerged as the world's workshop. Emerging-market crises and spendthrift U.S. policies have radically revalued currencies time and again.

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Why Exxon Won't Produce More

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Business Week - By Christopher Palmeri - Mar. 20 (Special Report) - Texas-based Exxon is the largest publicly traded company in the energy business. In fact, it's the most profitable company in the history of capitalism, earning a record $40.6 billion on sales of $404 billion last year. Yet even with prices at the pump near all-time highs, Exxon isn't planning on producing any more oil four years from now than it did last year. That means the company's oil output won't even keep pace with its own projections of worldwide oil demand growth of 1.2% a year.

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Yahoo's Unlikely Amigos

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Business Week - By Jon Fine - Jan. 29 (Opinion) - Evidently the newspapers are going to try to partner their way out of it. In this case, "it" is whatever disadvantages the medium faces in the online world

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The Most Important Trends of 2007

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 09:28:31 -0800

Business Week - Dec. 11 (Special Report) - Some pretty scary stuff happened this year, from the threat of $100 oil to a meltdown in the housing market. On the other hand, some great old rock bands, like the Police, got back together...

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LeBron Inc.

Fri, 30 Nov 2007 10:37:35 -0800

Business Week - By Tim Arango - Nov. 30 (Special Report) - Instead of just lining up endorsements and cashing checks, James is seeking equity in the companies he works with; and he is using his on-court prowess to build a corporation that deals with entities as disparate as Bubblicious and Warren Buffett.

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Is $100 Oil As Lethal As It Looks?

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 07:55:45 -0800

Business Week - Nov. 15 (News Analysis) - Economists are more worried about housing's downturn than oil's upturn, and for good reason. According to the Federal Reserve, the U.S. has roughly $20 trillion in residential real estate wealth. A 10% price decline, which many economists consider plausible, would reduce Americans' wealth by $2 trillion, traumatizing the financial system. It's not a perfect comparison, but a 50 cents increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline would cost the economy less than a tenth as much, about $75 billion a year. One reason oil prices may matter less is that the U.S. is not as dependent on oil as it was in the 1970s. According to Energy Dept. data, the amount of oil and natural gas required to produce the same amount of goods and services has declined 58% since 1973.

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E-Resistance Blooms in Pakistan

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:14:52 -0800

Business Week - By Manjeet Kripalani - Nov. 14 (Special Report) - Pakistan may be under military siege, but its citizens have found a place to make themselves heard through the sophisticated use of the Internet. An unexpected but robust underground e-resistance movement is under way in Pakistan -- from blogs, to flash mobs, to e-mails, to streaming video broadcasts, to cell-phone multimedia and text messages.

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A Better Measure Of Old Media?

Fri, 29 Jun 2007 10:06:20 -0700

Business Week - By Jon Fine - Jun. 29 (Special Report) - There is a data gap in media today, and smart executives worry about it. Google (GOOG ) knows a ridiculous amount about what its searchers do and what they click on: It has terabytes of data on consumer behavior. TV networks and the marketers who advertise on them may have prettier ads. But when it comes to finding out what makes consumers jump, they sometimes must resort to guesswork, or at least the crunching of disparate findings from disparate sources.

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From Peak Oil To Dark Age?

Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:36:53 -0700

Business Week - By Eugene Linden - Jun. 15 (Opinion) - With global oil production virtually stalled in recent years, controversial predictions that the world is fast approaching maximum petroleum output are looking a bit less controversial. At first blush, those concerned about global warming should be delighted. After all, what better way to prod the move toward carbon-free, climate-friendly alternative energy?

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The Real Cost Of Offshoring

Sun, 10 Jun 2007 09:43:24 -0700

Business Week - By Michael Mandel - Jun. 10 (Opinion) - In terms of trade policy, the new perspective suggests the U.S. may have a worse competitiveness problem than most people realized. It was easy to downplay the huge trade deficit as long as it seemed as though domestic growth was strong. But if the import boom is actually creating only a facade of growth, that's a different story. This lends more credence to corporate leaders such as CEO John Chambers of Cisco Systems Inc. (CSCO ) who have publicly worried about U.S. competitiveness--and who perhaps coincidentally have been the ones leading the charge offshore.

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The Poverty Business

Mon, 14 May 2007 08:42:33 -0700

Business Week - By Brian Grow, Keith Epstein - May. 14 (Special Report) - Greater access to credit has put cars, computers, credit cards, and even homes within reach for many more of the working poor. But this remaking of the marketplace for low-income consumers has a dark side: Innovative and zealous firms have lured unsophisticated shoppers by the hundreds of thousands into a thicket of debt from which many never emerge

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Coal? Yes, Coal

Mon, 30 Apr 2007 09:16:53 -0700

Business Week - Apr. 30 (News Report) - As evidence of global warming mounts, companies everywhere are going green. But not Peabody Energy Corp. (BTU ) Gregory H. Boyce, chief executive of the world's biggest coal company, is one of the few prominent opponents of climate regulation whose position hasn't softened one bit in recent months. Asked in March whether high levels of CO2 in the air are harmful, Boyce said: "I think the simple answer is we don't know."

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World's Most Networked Countries

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 08:24:10 -0700

Business Week - By Dan Carlin - Mar. 30 (Special Report) - The Geneva-based World Economic Forum, in partnership with French management school INSEAD, has just published its sixth Global Information Technology Report, which rates how well countries around the world use information and communications technology (ICT) to drive growth and development. This year saw several notable trends, including strong ICT growth in Latin America, a decline in U.S. standing, and further slippage for Africa. The survey is driven by more than just Internet penetration and bandwidth availability. It also looks at factors such as fixed- and mobile-phone usage and pricing, intellectual-property protection, the regulatory framework, press and judicial freedom, startup activity, R&D spending, and educational attainment. Click on to see how a selection of the world's economies fared this year and what factors have spurred or hampered their development. You'll also find a complete list of all 122 countries surveyed by clicking the interactive table link below.

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Down And Out In The 'Burbs

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 09:00:15 -0700

Business Week - By Jon Fine - Mar. 16 (Special Report) - Beloved backyard media efforts dot the U.S. There are scruffy independents, like iBrattleboro.com in Vermont or baristanet.com in New Jersey. There are those attached to extant operations, à la the News & Record. But, as Backfence found, to build a site from scratch is very difficult. (A former Backfencer says explaining the site to potential users left them feeling they were being sold something, as opposed to being given something.) And building one site successfully does not make it easier to build another elsewhere. "The virality that works nationally doesn't work locally," says Potts. In other words, the national echo chamber that can spur massive growth on MySpace (NWS ) won't work for separate community sites. All the more so for Backfence, which sought to let users create much of the content. It's easier for sites driven by a talented, semi-obsessed writer or two, like baristanet, to gain traction: Readers return for a stylish voice or a dependable hit of news.

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