Mick Weinstein's  Instablog

Felix Salmon asks

Is it OK for a financial services professional who has run into major trouble with the law to simply move over to journalism and cover the same asset class there?

This is in reference to Henry Blodget, Michael Whitney and Thom Calandra.

Back when Henry Blodget was a SA contributor, before he set up Silicon Alley Insider (which subsequently became part of The Business Insider), we were happy to carry his posts but insisted on this very thing - a full disclosure in his SA bio that he had been banned from the securities industry following the SEC's investigation into his activity at Merrill during the bubble years. Henry no longer submits to SA, and I see that he's adjusted his SA bio to something very similar to the bio he posted on TBI - but we also get a not so helpful link to the SEC's homepage:

He ran Merrill's global Internet research practice and was ranked the No. 1 Internet and eCommerce analyst on Wall Street by Institutional Investor and Greenwich Associates. He was later keelhauled by then-Attorney General Eliot Spitzer in a wide-ranging complaint about conflicts of interest between the research and banking divisions of brokerage firms (for details, please see sec.gov).

SA bios are now self-serve: the author or user has full control over them, not our editorial team. But there are situations where we'll step in for the sake of full disclosure of conflicts of interest, or to clarify when a contributor is using a pseudonym. And if Henry were to begin posting again on SA, I'd insist on returning a full disclosure of his securities industry ban to his bio.

This is a rule we've established for anyone who has a legal or regulatory history that a typical reader would want to know about while reading their material. In such cases, we insist on full disclosure of the infraction or settlement status, and that the author uses his/her real name. See, for example, Sam Antar.

I see this as an extension of our requirement that authors disclose personal/client holdings on posts that refer to individual stocks (which, by the way, also appears to be absent on The Business Insider sites). If you're reading an article on stocks by someone who has been fined by federal regulators for past communication about stocks, isn't that something incumbent upon the publisher to convey to you in a clear manner?

You're doing some great work over there at TBI, Henry. Insist on full disclosure of stock positions by your authors, and fill out your own bio as a new reader would want, and it'll be even better.

Our most popular article for the last few days has been Phil Davis' spirited critique of what he understands as a global oil scam - bankers working together to drive up the price of crude via dark pool trading on the commodities market.

InterContinentalExchange (ICE), a focus of Phil's critique, contacted us to dispute the article. As always, we want to correct any factual errors that may exist in the article, but we haven't heard any such claims yet from ICE. ICE preferred not to work through our standard process for disputing an article (we handle 5-10 such disputes per week). Instead, ICE and Phil are going to have a call today and see if they can work out their differences of fact, if not differences of opinion. If they can't, I hope to have either an official dispute from ICE, or an article from ICE that counters Phil's - or both.

Update: See the Editor's note at the end of Phil's article.

Investment advisor Zack Miller gave an interview to a Covestor member and shared some nuggets on this market, his movement toward a more quantitative approach, his Ivy League education ("Harvard didn’t offer undergraduates access to coursework or majors that actually prepared you to do something with your life."), and the logic behind asset manager blogging.

Zack also had some kind words about what we've accomplished at SA:

You have a rather unique background having been involved in the growing stages of SeekingAlpha, which as you know is a powerhouse in this industry today.  I’m sure you’d agree SA has had a significant impact to the financial community.  What was it like working at SeekingAlpha? The good and the bad?

I think Seeking Alpha changed and continues to change the way we look at financial content.  When we were sitting across the table with the senior staff of Dow Jones doing our first deal, we realized that we were on to something.  We helped legitimize non-traditional sources of financial information.  That trend is still so young.  In the early days, we had to convince our partners and prospective readers that contributors to Seeking Alpha weren’t amphetamine-popping, day traders living in the parent’s basements in the pajamas.  Now, Seeking Alpha is creating a unified communications platform designed specifically for the financial vertical.  I think it’s so powerful.

Newspapers' troubles have raised concern over who will defend and promote informed democratic debate if we lack a vibrant and viable Fourth Estate. But it's not at all clear that traditional media outlets are currently providing that service on a regular basis in any case. Two stories over the past few days remind us of the important role of independent bloggers to tell a story straight in a manner that traditional journalists still simply cannot. 

Glenn Greenwald at Salon has two disturbing posts on how GE's (GE) control over NBC and MSNBC, and News Corp.'s (NWS) control over Fox have driven editorial decisions at these outlets - see GE's silencing of Olbermann and MSNBC's sleazy use of Richard Wolffe and The scope -- and dangers -- of GE's control of NBC and MSNBC. (And don't miss the Charlie Rose hypocrisy item in the first post.)

Meanwhile, Eric Etheridge at NYT has a helpful wrapup of the latest blogs-are-killing-newspapers kerfuffle: a discussion around Gawker blogger Hamilton Nolan's re-use of Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira's juicy quotes from a recent WashPo column. The upshot as I see it: Nolan was able to speak in a real, direct, candid voice about the very items that Shapira produced but was unable to present in the manner that he himself wanted to due to the institutional restrictions of traditional journalism. But Matthew Ingram is certainly right that Nolan should have more clearly cited Shapira in his Gawker post. There is a problem of fair and balanced citation and linking of authors in the blogosphere.

Now of course, Greenwald's GE/NWS item has to do with corporate control over the political debate, while the Nolan/Shapira item addresses the stubborn lack of point-of-view in traditional journalism. But there's common ground: It's not just the economics of online content that threaten lively, direct and constructive debate. The conventions and ownership structures of large, traditional media outlets remain problematic to that end as well. While Shapira laments a lack of equity in Gawkers' use and (top-heavy!) profit from his work, the question of why Gawker blogs are so popular remains - and a good deal of that is due to the independent and opinionated point of view. As Gabriel Snyder says in a follow-up at Gawker: "blogs say the things that hidebound newspaper editors are too afraid to let their reporters write."

This is why we carry truly independent market bloggers at Seeking Alpha - and push the best of their writing to our homepage and Editors' Picks. You'll find unique, well-researched insight and critique of publicly traded companies here, because we have hundreds of independent contributors who thankfully lack any corporate or conventional media shackles and can simply call it as they see it.

We can therefore count of more of what John Reeder observes:

Members of the televised media are now resorting to taking on bloggers in order to draw attention to themselves.

From the NYT Q2 earnings call, CEO Janet Robinson:

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Is this morning's WSJ email alert a make-up for the previous, entirely pro-Microsoft email? More likely, they still haven't woken up to the issue (click to enlarge):

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