THE 5 BEST PANELS OF 2011

1. Who: Richard Just, Jodi Kantor, Ryan Lizza, moderated by Franklin Foer
Where: New America NYC
When: December 8, 2011
What we said: “One issue that hasn’t been addressed this season, the panel noted, is the global economic crisis, which Lizza pointed out is something that can’t be blamed on Obama, so it hasn’t been a part of the GOP talking points.

This event was sold on the weird and wacky characters and events from the past few months, yet the debate centered more on the question of where we go from here. Herman Cain’s name barely showed up, for one. It seems that it’s time to get serious.”

See the full review.

2. Who: Gay Talese, David Carr, Andrew Rossi, moderated by Bill Keller
Where: Times Center
When: June 14, 2011
What we said: “So will The Times live on? Rossi isn’t sure if journalism will remain the same on a new platform. Carr, however, thinks The Timeswill survive, even if only as a status symbol. When you’re on your iPad, he said, it’s impossible to tell if you’re reading The New York Times or not. Echoing this sentiment were two people sitting in front of us at the event who made it difficult to tell if they were tweeting about the panel on their iPhones or just checking their email.”

See the full review.

3. Who: Seth Meyers, John Mulaney, Marika Sawyer, Colin Jost, Erik Kenward, Bryan Tucker, Chris Kelly, moderated by Steve Gaydos
Where: Paley Center for Media
When: November 13, 2011
What we said: “They rely heavily on the audience at dress rehearsal on Saturday evening to telegraph what’s working and what’s missing the mark. Their approval is reflected through their ratings – which the writers claim doesn’t influence them – but another gauge  is Internet reaction. The writers say that SNL was made for YouTube well before YouTube even existed. After all these years, it continues to connect with new viewers and to cater to the times.”

See the full review.

4. Who: Michael Lewis, interviewed by Ira Glass
Where: 92nd St. Y
When: February 3, 2011
What we said: “Glass, one of the best interviewers out there, can make a heavy topic like finance come alive. He clearly has an affinity for Lewis, who he declares is one of the few journalists who does fact-based reporting while clearly having a good time doing it. Glass was at the top of his game, engaging with Lewis, reacting to both his answers and his implications, as he sought closure and a villain to blame for the economic downturn. But what Glass said he found in Lewis’ book, The Big Short, were ‘heroes’ in the form of bankers.”

See the full review.

5. Who: Nicholas Lemann, Stephen B. Shepard, moderated by Myron Kandel
Where: JCC of Manhattan
When: October 5, 2011
What we said: “We used to rely on news anchors and editors to determine the biggest news of the day. Now, we each choose for ourselves, and have the abilities to deliver our selections to others. What hasn’t changed is that people still rely on those they trust to help curate the news. And since there are more media options now than ever, everyone can find and design his or her own diet. Although it might be time to begin worrying about fragmentation…”

See the full review.

THE 10 BEST QUOTES OF 2011

1. “The thing to fixate on is not the weirdness of the weird candidates, it’s the weirdness of the normal candidate.”
- Richard Just believes the Republicans are scraping at the bottom of the barrel this time around

2. “That’s not that interesting…if it was that interesting, I would have asked the question.”
– Anderson Cooper jokingly takes issue with Reiss’ decision to begin a response with “Here’s something interesting…”

3. “One of the things the Internet did was pick apart the newspaper bit by bit.”
- Nicholas Lemann says that have more sources to get the information and resources we used to find inside of newspapers pages

4. “You don’t ever change what you know to be truth.”
– Oliver Stone takes issue with directors who don’t document fact correctly

5. “The people who get the joke don’t need an explanation. Those who don’t get it won’t understand the explanation.”
- Gilbert Gottfried explains his lack of explanations

6. “Criticism operates in a business environment that it can’t ignore or deny.”
- David Denby says it’s impossible to separate movies from the studios behind them

7. “It’s never about the character, it’s always about the story…I’ve always likened it to a rock n’ roll band. If the band is good, the bass player is cool.”
- Kiefer Sutherland aspires to be that bass player

8. “One thing we have in this family is the belief in freedom of the press even if it’s all about the press. And that’s a great tradition.”
- Gay Talese praises the Sulzbergers for their commitment to the paper

9. “Where do they pay kids who don’t know anything lots of money? Wall Street!”
- Michael Lewis says that some young people were drawn to banking after they read Lewis’ Liar’s Poker

10. “So much of this business is bluffing.”
- Josh Radnor responds to Akerman’s revelation that she had to convince Radnor she could take on the lead role

It’s a subject some of us choose not to discuss or think about anymore. Not because it makes us uncomfortable, but because it’s been exhausted over the past few years. And because it’s difficult to fully understand. If there were a time to bring up the financial crisis, however, Michael Lewis and Ira Glass are the ones to lead the discussion.

Glass, one of the best interviewers out there, can make a heavy topic like finance come alive. He clearly has an affinity for Lewis, who he declares is one of the few journalists who does fact-based reporting while clearly having a good time doing it. Glass was at the top of his game, engaging with Lewis, reacting to both his answers and his implications, as he sought closure and a villain to blame for the economic downturn. But what Glass said he found in Lewis’ book, The Big Short, were “heroes” in the form of bankers.

How’d Lewis pull that off? He made the characters likable. Lewis said that was easy because he genuinely did like the characters he covered in the book, and simply outlined their positive attributes. While impressed with Lewis’ achievement, Glass couldn’t held but be a bit disappointed that Lewis wouldn’t identify the “bastards” who caused the economic decline. When he admitted he wanted to “hate somebody,” Glass got a round of applause from the approving audience. Once pushed, Lewis said that the ratings agencies are at least partially at fault, arguing that they were “foolish, if not a bit crooked.”

Contrary to what we might hope, Lewis doesn’t think that many people willingly knew that the entire mortgage-backed security operation was a “scam.” He was able to get inside some of the biggest and most well-known banks thanks to contacts he made as a result of of his first Wall Street book, Liar’s Poker. A generation of young, ambitious students fell in love with the Wall Street that Lewis had depicted and chronicled, and they rewarded Lewis with access to interviews and information for his book. Lewis injected life into what might seem to be a complicated, boring business story in a way few others can.

What They Said
“I’m always attracted to the idea that there’s value in the things people aren’t looking at.”
- Michael Lewis looks for stories that others don’t stop to see

“Ignorance has been seen as an excuse.”
- Michael Lewis believes that someone needs to take responsibility for the crisis

“The most annoying thing about this financial crisis is when people say nobody could have predicted the crisis.”
– Ira Glass thinks that it’s possible to understand what bankers were doing wrong

“There’s going to be another financial crisis in a decade. The question is just what it is.”
– Michael Lewis hopes that we won’t be as blindsided by the next one

“Where do they pay kids who don’t know anything lots of money? Wall Street!”
- Michael Lewis says that some young people were drawn to banking after they read Lewis’ Liar’s Poker

What We Thought

• We can’t praise Glass enough. He asks very direct questions without sounding too leading. It’s hard to not give a long-winded response to provocative and probing questions. His many years of experience pay off every time he does an interview.
• Lewis revealed that he’s at work on a sequel to Moneyball. He said he spent three years following prospects in the minor leagues, to see how Billy Beane’s players turned out. It astounded us how much time Lewis puts into researching and preparing and making his books. There’s a reason he’s at the top of his game.

PANEL RULES!
Some audience behavior seems to repeat itself panel after panel. We’ll be updating a running list of “PANEL RULES!” that will help ensure that you are not the dweeb of the Panel Nerds.

Panel Nerds don’t like…Automatics
At many panels, when the night turns to the Q&A portion, we have noticed that the first two questions are usually quite similar: a) What do you regret/what would you do differently?, and b) What’s next? They’re not bad questions to ask, but they’re predictable. In the case of the first one, it’s a tough thing for people to answer since it requires them to admit they made mistakes with roles, or stories, or how they carried themselves. Odds are that they won’t made those kinds of sizable confessions on a stage in front of a couple hundred people. The second question here is always more interesting and delivers something more substantial. It paid off well in this case because it allowed Lewis to illustrate just how many projects he’s working on at once. It gave us insight into Lewis’ process and personality in much the way the first question so often fails to produce.

The memory will never leave me, because Ryan looked like he was not amused. I’m paraphrasing here from a foggy memory, but his answer was: “I’m a journalist. He doesn’t speak for all of us who have made a career out of reporting sports for decades.”

I respect Ryan – especially as someone who grew up reading him in the Globe. But that was a moment I realized that becoming the traditional, in-the-trenches sports reporter was long gone. For years, I pictured the massive divide between the press box and the bleachers, but Simmons was the first to successfully demonstrate that there didn’t have to be. He was on to something a lot sooner than the rest of us, he was writing in a blog style long before there were blogs, and ESPN recognized his talent and style quick enough to make a smart move and bring him aboard.

As someone who is one of the many influenced by Simmons, an everyman fan who has been a writer at ESPN.com for more than a decade, I will be among the first to admit he isn’t the pure commoner he once embodied. However, he still is putting himself out there from a very non-traditional place in the sports media world. He has such a distinct spot in the last decade of the Worldwide Leader, and not just on dot-com, but also because of his New York Times bestsellers, the 30 for 30 sports documentary series he produces and his star-studded podcast, The BS Report. He has a self-carved empire somewhere in the middle of “Booyah” and the screaming heads of Pardon The Interruption and Around The Horn.

The normal preaching about Simmons’s career appears in a column in April’s Atlantic Monthly by Isaac Chotiner. While a heavy emphasis on Simmons recent bestselling The Book of Basketball, Chotiner still gives plenty of ink to the following that the sportswriter has earned through his personality and style:

In public, Simmons fans love to yell out “Hey, Sports Guy!”—which (again) recalls voters who, when interviewed on camera about their candidate of choice, say that he is “one of us.” To Simmons’s credit, however, the unassuming nickname actually fits him comfortably. In certain respects, the public figure that Simmons most clearly resembles is the early David Letterman, although Letterman has never tried to seem like an average guy. Still, they have one thing in common: the way they personalize their work.

Chotiner sets up an even more interesting dichotomy in the column when he begins by referencing Bill James, whose stat-crunching encyclopedia of baseball is also very present as an influence to the works of Michael Lewis. Whether the obvious ties in Moneyball or the more shrouded stat-mind in the sports part of The Blind Side (i.e., the book, not the movie), Lewis is clearly a bookish disciple of James. The thing is that Simmons is kind of the opposite side of the same coin of Lewis; Chotiner places his tome of Basketball at the opposite end of the bookcase from James’s equally voluminous archive of statistics, yet certainly deserving of the same shelf.

This imagery is important for this era of journalism: Simmons is comprehensive in his coverage of sports, but not even close to the same way as James and Lewis. He grew up among fans in the decade of citizen journalism and online publishing, and he hasn’t let that change how he writes – he is proud to know Matt Saracen’s stats in the same way he does Matt Cassel’s. That has to irritate the crap out of the guys who’ve filed hurried game summaries from press boxes of low market teams to work their way up.

Yet, as Simmons has grown in popularity, the same problem has alienated him slightly from the fan base that once adores him. There’s a running joke about the time ESPN opened up comments for Simmons’ regular written columns – and how quickly the vitriol (actual comments in this 2007 Deadspin post) forced them to shut down that section for his posts still to this day.

In an exclusive interview with Mediaite last fall, Bill mentioned to Colby Hall:

You can’t work for ESPN and NOT be part of the establishment. For most people, we are the Starbucks of sports. When I started writing for them, it was like a switch went off — suddenly I was getting these “you sold out” emails and I’m like, “I sold out? Where’s the money?

The question I have, though, involves whether or not the establishment accepts him. It’s one thing to be a part of it, it’s quite another to be invited to the reporters’ buffet. As much as that ESPN tag makes him one of “The Man,” Simmons still has to fight the battle of being alongside the Rick Reillys, Gene Wojciechowskis and Bob Ryans of the world, with whom he still doesn’t line up perfectly. He’s as much outside the circle as inside of it in that regard.

Chotiner partly discussed Simmons in the same breath as David Letterman’s comedy stylings in the Atlantic feature. Letterman didn’t care who thought throwing watermelons off roofs wasn’t funny, he did it anyway; Simmons likewise doesn’t mind if you aren’t a fan of the television critics, fiction authors and former college roommates he parades through his podcasts. Changing the style to appease fans or join the reporter’s gallery isn’t in him – and even if he stands alone in this middle ground, he still will forever change the notion that there is no cheering in the press box. Because of him, the cheap seats are just as likely of a home for the next game changer in the future of sports journalism.

1. September 2008 – Lehman Bros. files for bankruptcy, amidst a flurry of frightening headlines, and the NYT.com begins its months-long habit of instilling fear in our hearts with homepage images of plummeting graphs. The blogosphere, which was on the story before the MSM, proves itself the more adept medium to handle the breakneck pace of the fallout.

SLIDESHOW: New York City newspaper front pages from Sept 15, 2008.

2. So much has happened in the interim that sometimes it’s sort of amazing to recall now that the economy tanked amidst the most historic election of our times, and that George Bush was our President when it happened. You may recall just a week after Lehman filed for bankruptcy, Senator John McCain suspended his campaign and dropped everything, including a Letterman appearance, to rush back to D.C. in order to fix things! By way of Katie Couric‘s set. This did not sit well with David Letterman who tore him to pieces on his show that night, inflicting early, and arguably severe, damage on a campaign that had yet to suffer the full effects of the Sarah Palin fiasco.

NEXT: Bernie Madoff, Jim Cramer, and Matt Taibbi

In the same essay, we have Microsoft’s Bill Gates saying he doesn’t even own a TV because if he did he wouldn’t have time to read the Economist cover to cover (maybe that’s how he missed the importance of the World Wide Web and the rise of Google!)

What accounts for the strange hold the Economist has over the American elite? Fallows provided a pretty good explanation. “The complications of Anglophilic snobbery and Oxbridge-style swagger prevent most American readers from realizing that, when they read Economist leaders, they’re essentially reading Wall Street Journal editorials, written with even less self-doubt.”

In re-reading Fallows’ piece recently, I laughed when I came upon this fairly cynical quote: “Americans think the Economist is better written because they impute a British accent to what they read.” The speaker was Richard Stengel, who would cite the Economist as his role model 17 years later, when he was tasked with reinventing Time Magazine.

This year, Stengel’s chief rival, Jon Meacham of Newsweek, also redid his magazine, in part to be more like the Economist (though in fairness, Meacham is also on the record dissing the Economist for its lack of original reporting).

Michael Hirschorn, the reality show impresario who moonlights as a media columnist for the Atlantic, has a very smart piece about the struggles U.S. newsweeklies find themselves in and how the Economist keeps chugging along, soaking up ads as if the whole InterWeb thing never happened. He notes that the entire American magazine industry – not just Time and Newsweek – often seems to have what he calls “Economist envy.”

Hirschorn puts his finger on the real reason for the Economist’s success – and why its admirers in the magazine industry sometimes miss the point even as they try to imitate it.  It is a sort of cheat sheet – or, as Hirschorn puts it,  “a true global digest.”  That’s roughly what Time and Newsweek were a long, long time ago, before they decided they needed to become more like the Economist. “True, the Economist virtually never gets scoops,” Hirschorn writes, “and the information it does provide is available elsewhere … if you care to spend 20 hours Googling.”

The Economist covers the world with dozens and dozens of hyper-distilled 400 to 500 word articles each week, all presented with that Oxford overlay that makes U.S. readers think it’s so authoritative. And it often has one long special report on subjects like the Malaysian electronics industry.

You sometimes get the feeling that the Economist is winking at you. It was odd that it called itself a newspaper 20 years ago, and is odder still today, given what’s going on in that business. And yes, the Economist covers the world more thoroughly than all but a handful of newspapers, and they manage to do it with far fewer people than even the smallest newspapers. They use a lot of stringers, whose dispatches from, say, Bangalore are often completely rewritten.

Ever wonder why the articles have no bylines? Fallows quoted Michael Lewis as saying that the cover of anonymity for the magazine’s writers, among other things, conceals how young much of the staff was, at least back then. “The magazine is written by young people pretending to be old people,” said Lewis. “If American readers got a look at the pimply complexions of their economic gurus, they would cancel their subscriptions in droves.”

Bill Gates might even start watching TV, if he hasn’t already.

Jim Impoco is a New York-based writer and a former editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and deputy editor of Portfolio. He writes for Mediaite about the financial press. Please send tips or comments to jimpoco@mediaite.com.

There is more interest, argument and passion surrounding the condition and future of American business than there has been in several generations. And yet, in the space of three months, two business magazines — the organs that exist to offer the stuff people are clamoring for — have been abandoned. One, Portfolio, a newbie, was closed. The other, BusinessWeek, an old stalwart, is up for sale, according to reports that caught even the magazine’s own editorial staff by surprise.
*
So while ad pages are plummeting for all magazines, they’re flirting with terminal velocity for business titles.

Perhaps Time needs to widen its definition of “business journalism.” It’s certainly not news that business magazines are having a rough ride at the moment, along with the rest of the magazine industry (or that Portfolio might have remained viable if Conde Nast had invested a little its online property) . But business journalism? That’s a bit of a stretch.

A quick glance at the Print / Online Reporters category of our Power Grid tells a slightly different story. Andrew Ross Sorkin, the NYT star business reporter, ranks #1; James Surowiecki, the New Yorker‘s business writer is #10; John Carney of The Business Insider is #21. While we’re on the subject, we’re told TBI averages 10 million monthly visits — not very terminal! It’s safe to say none of these people appear to be vanishing.

Neither does Michael Lewis, who recently left a plum contract with Portfolio for an even richer one with Vanity Fair — his article “The End” about how Wall St. met it’s demise last fall, was one of the most passed-around articles of last year. And then there’s Matt Taibbi, the Rolling Stone journo who’s turned his attention from politics to the business of Wall Street and whose two most recent articles on the subject — “The Big Takeover” and “Inside the Great American Bubble Machine” — have created some pretty significant waves inside and outside the business community (Our own business columnist, Jim Impoco, has written about both of them.)

All of which may lead the casual business reader to conclude that while BusinessWeek is in tough shape (and, in fact, this is really as far as the article reaches) business journalism itself is actually thriving, or at these those writers who were able to adapt their writing platforms to ones which were able to keep pace with the story itself.

Photo via.

That, of course, was before A.I.G. F.P., led by Joseph Cassano, became, as Lewis puts it, “the most receptive dumping ground for new risks created by big Wall Street firms.” It was also before practically everyone who worked there barely escaped a pogrom once A.I.G. turned into a $182.5 billion taxpayer liability.

Perhaps the biggest clue of what was to come was the unit’s DNA. A.I.G. F.P. was created in 1987 by alumni of the Beverly Hills junk bond giant Drexel Burnham Lambert, which was forced into bankruptcy amid scandal three years later and whose leader, Michael Milken, was indicted on 98 counts of racketeering and securities fraud. If Drexel were the first Friday the 13th movie, A.I.G. F.P. was one of those sequels in which Jason returns more powerful and hellish than ever.

Lewis does not provide an especially new answer to the question he poses at the outset: What exactly caused A.I.G.’s downfall? But he does present a nuanced look at the trading unit most people now realize was the culprit. (He also suggests, oddly but provocatively, that Eliot Spitzer, as New York’s hyper-kinetic attorney general, may have hastened the crisis by forcing the resignation of A.I.G. kingpin Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, who was arguably the only person who understood how the crazy-quilt financial company he put together really worked.)

What’s especially noteworthy about Lewis’s article is that F.P.’s money managers spoke to him; stunningly, they claimed no one else in the media had come knocking. And they all insist that there was no fraud at the unit – just a bad manager (Cassano) who made disastrous financial investments he may or may not have understood. For the record, as it were, Lewis granted most of them anonymity, but that doesn’t seem to be a problem; the whole crackdown on anonymous sources – “anonymice,” as Slate’s Jack Shafer calls them – seems increasingly like debating how many angels can fit on a pinhead, given the parlous state of the newspaper industry.

Considering the mess newspapers find themselves in, the remarkable thing about Lewis’s take is that it ran at all. It’s no small relief to find important financial stories like this in one of the glossiest of glossies. And for that we might thank the late Condé Nast Portfolio, strange as that might seem. (Disclosure: I was, depending on how you counted, Employee No. 2 or 4 at Portfolio, where I lasted 18 months.)

Today, Vanity Fair has perhaps the best magazine stable of financial writers around – besides Lewis, its roster includes Bethany McLean, Bryan Burrough (who, with John Helyar, wrote Barbarians at the Gate), and Michael Wolff, who understands business more deeply than most media writers. That agglomeration of talent is no accident.

Even though Portfolio was shuttered recently, Si Newhouse and other higher-ups at Condé Nast had at one point thought there was a big enough hole in existing coverage that it wagered – and lost – at least $100 million. That conviction got people’s attention inside as well as outside of 4 Times Square.

Graydon Carter, VF’s editor in chief, was never one to wonk out when it came to financial stories. Yes, Vanity Fair has over the years provided a steady stream of often very knowing business articles, but, clearly, Carter didn’t see that as a big part of his mandate; some of the business writers on his payroll told me that he was an especially hard sell. (Similar complaints were leveled at the New Yorker’s David Remnick, who was described to me as bored by business stories back when Portfolio was being hatched.)

Then along came Portfolio, which billed itself early on as “the Vanity Fair of Business.” Ferociously competitive, Carter set about shoring up VF’s business coverage. He also stocked up on prominent financial writers, grabbing McLean from Fortune and Lewis from Portfolio.

Now, with economic news front and center, VF has a formidable lineup churning out some of the best long-form business journalism around. McLean had a similarly sophisticated piece on Fannie Mae a few months earlier.

That may not be Portfolio’s only legacy, but even if it were, it’s a pretty good one.

Jim Impoco is a New York-based writer and a former editor of the Sunday Business section of the New York Times and deputy editor of Portfolio. This is the first of occasional posts on Mediaite about the financial press. Please send tips or comments to jimpoco@mediaite.com.