Is it self-serving to note that business journalism has seen a renaissance on the Web over the past year? Quartz and Business Insider continued to thrive. We and BuzzFeed started business sections. Jessica Lessin, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, launched The Information, a subscription-based site for tech news and analysis. Yet long-form business journalism remains an endangered species, and little appears to have changed since Dean Starkman wrote of its decline at Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit back in January. And so we’ve decided to highlight thirty-one of the best long business articles of the year, according to our writers. (Bloomberg Businessweek did something similar recently.) Our recommendations follow.
James Surowiecki:
Kevin Drum’s brilliant Mother Jones piece, “America’s Real Criminal Element: Lead ,” explores the relationship between lead in the environment and crime (and a host of other social ills). It is not, I guess, a classic business story. But it’s a rigorous and enormously enlightening look at how businesses’ and regulators’ choices—in this case, the decision to keep lead in gasoline and paint—end up shaping society in ways that few expect. I’m not entirely sure that lead explains the entire drop in crime we’ve seen in cities across America. But Drum has certainly convinced me that getting lead out of the environment is one of the best, and most cost-effective, social interventions that regulators can make.
Barry Werth’s deep dive into the intricacies of drug pricing for Technology Review, “A Tale of Two Drugs ,” offered a fascinating look at just how drug companies go about setting prices, and at the complicated interplay of market demand, government influence, and corporate profit-seeking. Werth’s story suggests that the advent of personalized medicine could well end up making drugs more expensive, not less. In doing so, he makes obvious that we need to think harder as a country about just what we’re willing to pay for (and how much we’re willing to pay).
I also thought Paul Lukas’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece on the battle between twist-tie makers and plastic-clip makers, “Twist-ties vs. Plastic Clips ,” was terrific, shedding light on a market that’s integral to everyday life but that we never really think about.
John Cassidy:
I recently read a great piece in New York, “Chasing A-Rod .” When you got into it, it was really a piece about the skeezy legal battle between two businesses trying to protect their franchises: Team A-Rod and Major League Baseball.
I also saw, in Fortune, a very funny interview with Ted Turner, “Ted Turner at 75: A Q&A .” Turner is still a lot more entertaining than the current generation of corporate suits and Internet moguls. The first question: “How are you feeling about life at 75?” Ted’s reply: “It’s better than being dead.” It goes on in that vein, with lots of stuff about Time Warner, Rupert Murdoch, and Turner’s efforts to protect endangered species, including prairie dogs. He says he wishes he’d never sold Turner Broadcasting.
In a more serious vein, I try to keep up with The Economist, and, in particular, its in-depth survey pieces, which are a good way to monitor what’s going on around the world. Back in March, the magazine published a piece, “Aspiring Africa ,” that presented an optimistic case for Africa’s progress. And in April, there was an informative one about China and the Internet, “A Giant Cage .” It argued that the development of social media may have helped the Communist Party as much as hindered it.
I still get the New York Review of Books, which is the first American magazine I subscribed to, almost thirty years ago. In a recent issue, Pankaj Mishra, the Indian writer, had an interesting piece about what’s happened to his homeland, and the rival takes of two eminent U.S.-based Indian economists: Amartya Sen and Jagdish Bhagwati. Mishra was clearly more sympathetic to Sen, who is critical of economic liberalization. I don’t know enough about the Indian experience to take sides. But “Which India Matters? ” was just the sort of piece I like: big issues, big ideas, forcefully expressed.
Finally, I try to keep up with what’s happening in economics, which has gotten more interesting since the financial crisis. Since the orthodox models failed, there’s been a revival of interest in other approaches. Earlier this year, W. Brian Arthur, of the Sante Fe Institute, published a working paper, “Complexity Economics ,” explaining the field after which the paper is titled, which uses computer models to study the development of things like stock-market crashes and technological lock-in. I’m not entirely convinced these models will perform better than the old ones, but Arthur is one of the pioneers in the field, and his article is very readable. (No equations!)
Evan Osnos:
This was a year of reckoning for Internet culture in China. The unruly power of Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, was abruptly curtailed when leaders cracked down on expression in the hope of beating back a wave of critical discussion. The energy was not extinguished; it moved into a range of new sites and forms, which began a new chapter in this complex narrative about power and technology. Nobody chronicled this tension more thoughtfully than Gady Epstein in his project “A Giant Cage ,” which appeared as a special report in The Economist. The piece did not set out to satisfy either the cyber-utopians or the cynics; it was the indispensable long take on the economic, political, and business outlook for the Web in the country that has both the world’s largest Internet population and history’s largest effort to censor expression.
One of the great dramas of this year—this decade, most likely—has been the ghost war waged between Chinese and American hackers. (Call the Americans what you will: security consultants, N.S.A. contractors, and others unknown.) “A Chinese Hacker’s Identity Unmasked ,” by Dune Lawrence and Michael Riley, in Bloomberg Businessweek, gave us a more vivid view of that world than we had previously seen. “Up to now, private-sector researchers … have had scant success putting faces to the hacks,” they wrote. Through the work of the researcher Joe Stewart, the authors eventually get close enough to a Chinese hacker to see him in his vacation photos, “squinting into the sun with his back to the waves, arm in arm with a woman the caption says is his wife.”
Vauhini Vara:
Having covered Silicon Valley for several years, I was thrilled, if envious, to read a piece this year that finally captured the ambition and exuberance of Silicon Valley’s tech faithful. George Packer’s piece in the magazine, “Change the World ,” is nominally about Silicon Valley’s politics, but its scope is much broader than that: to me, the piece was about the pervasive belief in Silicon Valley that tech innovation can solve society’s most pressing problems. Packer lets Silicon Valley’s young élite speak for themselves, often at length. After one tech founder memorably goes on about the greatness of apps that have made it easier for him to dine at restaurants and order takeout, Packer writes, “It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”
The Times published several excellent business stories this year, including “As OSHA Emphasizes Safety, Long-Term Health Risks Fester ,” by Ian Urbina, and several stories on the Rana Plaza factory collapse, in Bangladesh, and its aftermath. The best, in my opinion, was David Kocieniewski’s “A Shuffle of Aluminum, but to Banks, Pure Gold ,” an examination of Goldman Sachs’s little-known business of storing aluminum for rent-paying customers. By holding the metal for long periods of time—a practice that the bank has since stopped—Goldman Sachs drove up the cost of aluminum, which ultimately increased the cost to consumers of buying things like a can of Coke. What set Kocieniewski’s story apart from so many other narratives about dubious Wall Street practices was its clarity in explaining the practice and its impact on regular people.
In “The Child Exchange ,” for Reuters, Megan Twohey investigated a practice I had never heard of: “private re-homing,” in which parents go online to advertise unwanted children whom they have previously adopted, and then pass them on to strangers. The practice takes place with little or no government scrutiny; those who end up with the children often are people who can’t, or don’t want to, pay to adopt a child themselves. “If you don’t want to pay $35,000 for a kid,” one of them told Twohey, “you take your chances.”
Akash Kapur:
India’s economy had a tumultuous, and largely depressing, year. In November, The New York Review of Books published a review by Pankaj Mishra of two books (one by Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, the other by Jagdish Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya), titled “Which India Matters? ” Mishra did an excellent job of summarizing not only the ideological differences between these authors but also the broader challenges confronting the country.
The Caravan consistently publishes some of the best long-form reporting in India. Several articles were impressive, but Mark Bergen’s “Line of Credit ,” on India’s new Central Bank governor, was among the best: it changed the way I think about India’s economic situation, and also brought to life the human element—and even drama—of what could easily have been a dry story about monetary policy.
As a bonus, if I can cheat a little, let me add a piece published in October, 2012: Mehul Srivastava’s evocative and informative piece, for Bloomberg, “Hunger Stalks My Father’s India Long After Starvation End ,” about a return to his father’s ancestral village, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, and his discovery of the country’s lingering malnutrition epidemic.
Elizabeth Greenspan:
In “Arise, Tenderloin ,” a ramble through San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin district in San Francisco Magazine, Gary Kamiya imagines a best-case scenario of gentle gentrification for the neighborhood, in which crime declines and families feel safe but long-time residents aren’t displaced. We meet activists and nonprofit leaders trying to achieve this “blue-sky vision,” as Kamiya calls it—but it doesn’t seem totally unachievable.
On the other coast, Ian Frazier writes unforgettably about New York City’s homeless population in “Hidden City ,” for this publication. Frazier is sharp and witty and has too many brilliant lines like the following: “During the twelve years of the Bloomberg administration, the number of homeless people has gone through the roof they do not have.”
Amy Merrick:
In “Trials: A Desperate Fight to Save Kids & Change Science ,” the Wall Street Journal’s Amy Dockser Marcus begins with an animated image of a little girl curled up next to her sister under a blanket. In context, it is a fragile moment: Dockser Marcus spent six years following a group of parents and scientists who collaborate—and sometimes clash—to try to find a treatment for Niemann-Pick disease, type C, a rare and fatal genetic disorder. The parents’ impatience spurs the researchers to develop a promising drug, though they achieve only a partial victory.
In “How Much Is a Life Worth?,” James Oliphant, of National Journal, also begins with children, but this time the story asks how parents should be compensated for their losses. The family of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old boy killed in the Boston Marathon bombings in April, received more than two million dollars. The family of seven-year-old Heaven Sutton, shot dead at her mother’s candy stand in Chicago in June, received nothing. The story’s protagonist is Kenneth Feinberg, familiar for his role administering compensation to victims of the September 11th terrorist attacks, the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and the Boston bombings, among others. Oliphant calls him “Death’s accountant.” Feinberg, a thoughtful and weary leader who escapes his burdens by listening to Wagner, muses about why some tragedies produce an outpouring of private donations—cable-news narratives can sway emotions—and explains why he doesn’t visit claimants in the hospital. In one anguished moment, a Boston victim debates whether to have his gangrenous legs amputated, to increase the value of his award by a million dollars.
Lauren Smiley:
The latest tech boom in San Francisco has inspired a new canon of journalistic diagnoses—my favorite of which was Ellen Cushing’s “The Bacon-Wrapped Economy,” in the East Bay Express. With deep reporting and whip-smart analysis, Cushing explores how tech money is altering the mores of the Bay Area.
Fast Company published a compelling profile on Anne Wojcicki, the founder of the personal DNA testing company 23AndMe: “Inside 23AndMe Founder Anne Wojcicki’s $99 DNA Revolution .” The writer used a nom de plume, Elizabeth Murphy, because she tested her child’s DNA for the story; she deserves much credit for contrasting Wojcicki’s unrelenting optimism about her business with the writer’s own worries over revealing her daughter’s genetic code.
Ann Friedman wins the “Why didn’t I write this first?” prize for exploring the false promise of career acceleration on LinkedIn—a site where, as at a networking happy hour, you “end up talking to the sad sacks you already know.” Her piece, at The Baffler, was aptly titled “All LinkedIn with Nowhere to Go .”
And Ashley Harrell penned a hauntingly gorgeous piece of literary journalism, “Saving Grace ,” for SB Nation, about a man who heals after a horrific family tragedy with the help of his dolphin-ecotourism business in Costa Rica.
(Some disclosures are warranted: Cushing is an editor at San Francisco Magazine, where I often write. Harrell is a former coworker at San Francisco Weekly, and Friedman a former roommate for a summer in Des Moines. You’ll find their pieces deserving despite my ties.)
Duff McDonald:
I love a meaty business feature as much as anybody. But, as a writer of business commentary, I would like to point to work by other columnists.
“Why Risk Managers Should be Spymasters ,” by ProPublica’s Jesse Eisinger, on how Wall Street risk managers have been coöpted by their masters, as well as the paradoxical effect of “risk weightings”—the less risky an asset is deemed, the more crowded a trade becomes, thereby raising the odds of a bubble. “Don’t Worry, Jamie, Lloyd’s Shown the Way ,” Eisinger’s amusing piece on the reputational reversal between Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, was one of those pieces that I wish I’d written myself.
“Corporate Tax Posturing Should Stop ,” by John Gapper of the Financial Times, thoughtfully considered the hypocrisy of politicians’ sounding off against companies’ exploitation of global tax loopholes. A bonus: he was able to artfully weave in a 1936 quote from the Duke of Westminster.
One of this year’s best from Felix Salmon, of Reuters, was “The Default Has Already Begun ,” the only piece about the shutdown, as far as I know, that referenced the zombie apocalypse and “Fight Club.” Just pray he never sets his sights on you: I took some shrapnel in another of his posts this year, “The JPMorgan apologists of CNBC ,” and the ensuing pile-on was nothing short of a revelation.
And there’s one straight news story I just have to mention. Some readers’ eyes might glaze over trying to decipher “Blackstone Unit Wins in No-Lose Codere Trade ,” an excellent piece of pure reporting by Bloomberg’s Mary Childs, Julie Miecamp, and Stephanie Ruhle about the private-equity firm Blackstone and some funny business in the credit-default-swap market. Thankfully, Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” provided a translation in layman’s terms.
Photograph by H. Armstrong Roberts/Retrofile/Getty.
The New Yorker
from Currency http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/12/the-best-business-journalism-of-2013.html
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