Jack Shafer at Slate raises the central issues of business reporting, where the commoditization of information stands in stark distinction to the democritization of media and greater corporate and government transparency:

What political intel units do seems indistinguishable from what newspaper reporters do, except that their wealthy clients pay much more and fewer readers get to see their product.

But does that make it journalism? If you regard what the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Forbes, Bloomberg News, Reuters, the Financial Times, and Fortune do as journalism, you call the political intel reports anything but high-priced, low circulation journalism. Like the Wall Street Journal, the political intel groups exist to give their clientele an information advantage over the competition that will translate into profits.

The first journalism marketed both financial information and political intelligence.

…As a business news operation gets better at distributing information—i.e., building circulation—a strange thing happens to the value of information collected. Only the first readers who receive and act on the information can profit from it. For example, the Wall Street Journal provides a rich data dump six days a week, but it’s futile for all 2.7 million readers to act on it, because the commercial advantage is quickly harvested.

The article focuses on the roles of financial analysts and lobbyists as reported by the WSJ on December 8th:

As federal authorities try to crack down on illegal trading using secrets leaked from companies, some hedge-fund managers are tapping another source of information: the corridors of the Capitol.

Hedge funds are finding that Washington can be a gold mine of market-moving information, easily gathered by the politically connected. The funds are hiring lobbyists — not to influence government, but to tell them what it’s going to do. Several lobbying firms are ramping up their “political-intelligence” units and charging hedge funds between $5,000 and $20,000 a month for tips and predictions.

At the same time, PBS’s MediaShift has just published an interview with Bill Grueskin, the managing editor of the Journal’s website:

The Journal in general is undergoing another rethink for the digital age, with plans for a smaller print edition launching on January 2, and a move to more analysis in print and breaking news online. There’s even a move afoot to change the way reporters at the Dow Jones newswire, the print Journal and online Journal do their jobs. Instead of all three reporters covering the same news conferences and earnings reports, the basic bare-bones stories will be left to the wire reporters, leaving the others to add to the stories as they develop.

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PBS: Do you think there’s a place for citizen journalism at WSJ, or ways your readers could help you with newsgathering in some way?

Grueskin: One of the biggest issues we face with citizen journalism is disclosure. That is, in financial and business news, it’s vital that readers know what interest, if any, a journalist has in a company. That’s why our ethics code is so tough on issues such as stock ownership, selling stocks short, etc. WSJ journalists sign that code every year, and it is critically important in establishing our bona fides on stories in which people can make, or lose, a fortune. I don’t know how we could replicate that with citizen journalists.

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