March 17th, 2008
JPMorgan Buys Bear Stearns: Following A Breaking News Story On The Web
Nothing like the biggest business story in recent memory — JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2 (a share) — breaking on a Sunday to bring into sharp relief the difference between news on the web and news in print — not to mention differences in how news is presented on the web.
What’s so interesting about this case is that all the reporting on this story from Friday — when business news usually takes a break for the weekend — quickly became utterly old and outdated when the deal was announced on Sunday. As of Friday, it was clear that Bear Stearns was headed for a government bailout, but the fire sale price really took everyone by surprise.
This deal was rushed to closing on Friday to try to prevent a market meltdown from beginning in Asia before the start of U.S. “banker’s hours” on Monday. So you’ve got the fifth largest investment bank sold for almost nothing and international markets opening with a scream — all on a Sunday evening.
What’s a newspaper to do? Especially when this story will continue to unfold throughout the day on Monday. Printing the paper Sunday night must feel like shooting a movie with a still camera — you capture a moment in time, but the action is already moving on.
In my first issue of the Washington Post Sunday edition today, the front page lead is a local story on D.C.’s gun ban, and the business section lead is an evergreen story about getting your own health insurance — nothing on the Bear Stearns story — and I say, well done. There is plenty of non-breaking news content in the paper that looks interesting to read later in the week, if I have time, and that’s the way it should be. I’m planning to read a piece on Eliot Spitzer by fiction writer Richard Russo — a reflection on the story after the news is done breaking does well in print.
In contrast, the fast moving Bear Stearns story and its reverberations in the financial markets belongs on the web, a medium much better equipped to handle it.
But there’s a lot for news organizations to learn about how this story is covered and presented on the web — and how a news consumer can follow it and find interesting coverage.
Here’s what the NYTimes.com homepage looks like right now:
They’ve clearly got the story covered, but the homepage has changed greatly throughout the day as the story broke — and there’s no way to look back. The homepage is still operating like a print newspaper, capturing a moment in time.
Compare that to the NYTimes.com’s DealBook, a web-native “section” of the site, which displays it’s reporting in reverse chronological order, so that you can actually look back at how the story unfolds. Here’s what I see now in the Investment Banking topic:
JPMorgan’s Expanding Campus
Remembering the Fed’s Last Bank Bailout
Recapping the JPMorgan Conference Call
The Cost of Bear’s Crisis to Its Employees
Update: Bear Stearns has agreed to sell itself to JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share. The firm’s shares closed at $30 on Friday, giving it a market value of $4.1 billion. For DealBook’s full coverage of the Bear Stearns crisis, go here.
Paulson Defends Fed Bailout of Bear Stearns
For this story, DealBook’s blog format is much more useful — especially since they can update a post with new facts, but still leave it as part of the chronology.
News is not static — it’s constantly in motion. But it also has a narrative, a story arc that it is often very instructive to follow. The New York Times has a wealth of reporting that covers a story as it unfolds — but the homepage is useless for looking at the story arc. NYT also segments its main news reporting, i.e. what goes in the print paper, from its web publications like DealBook, making it impossible to get a coherent view of all its content.
Here are some more observations:
I get NYT headlines on Twtitter, but I heard about the story from Howard Lindzon long before the NYT story hit my Twitter feed.
All I get on the NYTimes.com is the perspective of NYT reporters, who are top notch, but I had to go to an aggregator to find other perspectives. Gabe explains why I found what I was looking for on Techmeme:
Techmeme dampers stories outside of its own idiosyncratic concept of “tech” news. But stories of Bear Stearns magnitude can break through…
Digg had nothing on the story because business and the economy don’t really interest most Digg users:
Digg’s Business & Finance Top in 24 hours page has all of four stories on this unbelievably busy business news day:
Even Business & Finance Most Recent has nothing on the deal closing:
When a story interests Digg users, it’s a lightning fast news source, but here, not so much. And did I really need Digg to tell me to check out WSJ or CNN? Also notice it’s just a few users submitting most of the stories.
The problem with following the Bear Stearns story on the web is that traditional news brand sites are too conflicted between serving print readers and serving web readers, and many aggregators are too narrowly focused to do handle business and the economy.
Just as with election news, there’s a huge untapped opportunity to help news consumers on the web find and follow the best coverage of a breaking business story.
Of course, there’s always Google News — if you can figure out which of the 3,920 stories are worth reading.
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nice summary scott & great anaysis. particulary like the meta-story told in pictures & headlines. I once spoke to Gabe about other topic-specific versions of Techmeme for Finance, etc but currently his efforts indicate only categories with lot of cross-linked blogs work well (politics, gossip, sports seem to do ok based on his current projects, but tech works best for now).
anyway great post
you read me
from someone who only follows business news and techmeme, let me say that my commenters did not let me down.
it was my own community that relayed, updated and than followed the market tick by tick using twitter and my comment system disqus.com
it was cool.
the only thing I needed bloomberg for was as a verification tool, than we were off.
Great summary of the utility (and more importantly, lacking utility) of various implementations of news on the web. I never liked the NYT homepage. You’re dead right as you described: it’s always a snapshot of RIGHT NOW. And, they’re casting aside crucial information I’m giving them. For example, they know the last time I logged in. Why not tell me what the most important stories are since the last time I hit the site. Or, even simpler, I’ll give the NYT a date range if they’ll return a set of stories sorted by importance.
The BBC created a programme to store their home pages over time so you can look back at the development of a story - it was born out of their initiative where they ask visitors to come up with technical ideas for their site.
Great analysis, especially about the lack of Digg coverage on issues like this. I’ve noticed it, as well, that CNN and the WSJ have no trouble getting popular stories with many Diggs, but who really needs to Digg something that everyone already knows about? If you don’t know who CNN or the Wall Street Journal are, you probably don’t know what Digg is, either.
This story on Bear Stearns and your great analysis here points out that information travels very quickly on the internet, but there is a lack of tools to aggregate that information at a pace that keeps up. Very interesting.
Interesting and thoughtful post, Scott. I agree with most of your analysis. Nonetheless, I find myself asking: who cares? I’m being snarky, of course, but I mean it literally.
We’re all familiar by now with the advantages of the Web versus print on a fast-moving story like this. But for the vast majority of people, isn’t the volume, presentation and speed of coverage provided by the NYT or the WSJ or CNN more than enough?
I’d posit that there are basically two groups looking for more/better/faster: industry-types with some sort of direct vested interest in the outcome of the story, and information junkies.
More here: http://brijit.wordpress.com/2008/03/17/at-what-point-does-news-break-too-fast/
Hi Jeremy,
more/better/faster
That seems to conflate several different issues.
Let’s take MORE. Why do the cable news networks do so well yabbering on and on about a big story, even beyond the point where there’s anything new to say? Because most people want to hear more.
Your faith in the power of a single content brand to satisfy is quaint, but doesn’t reflect the intuitive post-Google understanding that most people have of the wealth of content on the web.
This post right here got an avalanche of traffic today from Google because I happened to initially misspell Bearn Stearns in the title — that avalanche was from people going to Google to find more on the story. And that was just the subset of people who can’t spell well, who made it all the way down to the cluster Google Blog search results.
Even the New York Times itself doesn’t share your faith. Why do you think they killed TimesSelect? Because they see more and more traffic coming in through intermediaries like search — and I’ll be less through the brand front door.
Here another interesting piece of evidence on the search result page for “Bear Stearns news”:
If everyone is going to the NYT homepage, why advertise?
I wouldn’t expect established news entities to resolve these issues. They’re more focused on the advertiser’s dollars. The majority of news readers are very content with print media and don’t understand/don’t need the possibilities offered by the internet. Until the print audience is more capable technologically, few news organisations will venture into this territory - not for quite a few years. When advertisers see that their money is going towards something more tangible, they’ll feel better with parting with it and the online news media will grow faster.
Here’s the opportunity — to have something to offer them when they realise the possibilities and want to get to the front of the pack, fast.
Nice snapshot Scott. More of the Harry Potter portrait kind than a stills camera…
I think the issue for incumbants is an inability to see beyond what they’ve always done. It’s fantastic when a brand wants to tackle ‘news’ for the first time now - with a blank sheet of paper.
Then they get to be really clear about what news is:
My take?
News is:
1. Personalised, real time, community-created, shared information.
2. Best gathered at the point of inspiration (on that handy converged device - the mobile)
3. Best distributed to the point of need (and, taking advantage of the always on, always with you nature of that same converged device, that’s best served by mobile, too).
This draws from the understanding that it is the community that best serves its own needs. An individual cannot get this from a disaggregated collection of digitised information. They can from a… community of shared interest. The community emerges as the dominant force.
From: The Power of the Network = The Power of We: Why Media is the New Business Ecology.
Scott:
To be clear, I have no faith that a single content brand has the power to satisfy. I think we probably agree that, all things being equal, people are better off and better informed when they have easy access to the best content from a wide array of trusted sources. But I absolutely believe in the power of reputable brands, now more than ever. As someone who’s built such a brand with publishing2, I’d think you would, too.
Nor am I arguing against the power of search, aggregation, or crowdsourcing. They’re all fundamental, and I’d think we agree there as well.
But the folks at CNN or Fox News going round and round on the same topic over and over again with nothing new to say? That serves two distinct audiences: the news junkies, who watch iteration after iteration; and everybody else, who jump in and out looking for updates. And not for nothing, even on their very best days (election nights, crisis events, etc.), you’re talking about a combined audience of fewer people than a typical episode of CSI on CBS.
As for the NYT taking down TimesSelect, they’re betting on the search value of a library of quality content that only gets bigger every hour of every day. Take away the brand, and the trust that goes with it, and the math becomes very different. And my guess is the Times advertises around keywords like “Bear Stearns news” because they’ve done the work and discovered they can arbitrage the traffic effectively.
Hope you’re well. Would love to catch up. Will ping you off-blog.
[…] March 16th, in a longstanding tradition of taking over troubled businesses and making them better, JPMorgan Chase & Co. announced it would acquire the flailing investment firm Bear Stearns for 2$ a share with support from the […]
[…] influence of search on news consumption thanks to a spelling error. My post last Sunday about about how news sites were covering the breaking news about the Bear Stearns bailout originally had the misspelling “Bear Sterns”. (Anyone who reads this blog regularly […]