Mexican billionaire Pliego says U.S. needs to legalize narcotics, change its attitude
Ricardo Salinas Pliego at Arizona State University. (Photo: Mike Reicher)
PHOENIX — Just a day after the local sheriff started an illegal immigration sweep, Mexican billionaire and telecomm magnet Ricardo Salinas Pliego told an audience here Friday that “hysterical voices of racists and isolationists” stood in the way of U.S. – Mexico relations.
Pliego was speaking to journalists at the SABEW conference at Arizona State University. He said that fortifying the border was “a totally mistaken policy” and that the two countries should instead be exploring new economic partnerships.
Also, Pliego suggested that the United States should consider legalizing narcotics in order to neutralize drug violence.
[VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP]
SEC Specializes to Combat Fraud
After a year of looking through internal inefficiencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission is moving to specialized departments and away from generalists handling a variety of cases.
Robert Khuzami, SEC Director of Enforcement, in a seminar at SABEW’s annual conference said that they found the organization to be management heavy and lacking centralized protocol between departments. With increased funding, the SEC’s five new departments will help manage the deluge of tips – 700,000 last year – with officers concentrating on asset management, market abuse, structured new products, corporate bribery and municipal securities. The revamp will be complete by mid-April as the departments finish hiring.
Business Journalism Heats Up
PHOENIX — Since it’s spring break for the students at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, the campus should have been empty. But just under 300 business writers, editors, and others in the field have flocked to the Phoenix, Ariz. campus for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference.
“Business journalism is heating up, rather than cooling down,” said Mark Scarp, membership coordinator at SABEW.
And he was not talking about southwest’s notorious dry heat. Journalism and business are both in the midst of seminal — and most would say painful –revolutions. No one understands that better than the conference attendees.
“We all have smaller staffs than we used to and yet the economic crisis is even more important,” said Megan Schnabel, editor at the Blue Ridge Business Journal. Everyone needs to do more with less, she said.
But the conference line-up will not focus on the dire state of the industry, according to Scarp and Warren Watson, Executive Director of SABEW. Instead, everything oriented around skills and the news itself.
“People rely now on business journalists,” Scarp said, in the aftermath of the crisis. “Business journalists need to have as many resources as they possibly can. Now more than ever.”
Organizations like the Associated Press, Google, and the Reynolds Center came to build support for their products and to give tutorials to conference-goers. For those exhibitors, the $1700 booth fee was well worth it, according to Alexandra Stein of the Greater Phoenix Economic Council.
The annual conference boasts big-name speakers like Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., chairman and publisher of The New York Times; “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg; and Leonard Downie Jr., who helped The Washington Post win 25 Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure as executive editor. It is the largest ever at Arizona State’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication’s new campus. SABEW officials estimate the numbers of paid attendees, exhibitors, speakers, and others will be between 275 and 300.
The big names and skill-gathering alone did not bring journalists like Schnabel.
“A big part of it is networking, getting to know other business journalists facing the same challenges,” she said.
But it’s not all bad, according to Schnabel.
“We’re being forced to decide which coverage is most important to our readers.” And that means being more deliberate in their choices. Prioritizing is not a bad thing, according to Schnabel.
On the sunny Friday in Phoenix, many shared that optimism. Scarp was laid off from his job as a general news reporter for the East Valley Tribune in Mesa, Ariz. Now, he works for SABEW and teaches journalism ethics as ASU.
“I’m grateful to still be in journalism,” he said.
Pay czar Feinberg says executive pay limits are working
Kenneth Feinberg presented at the Society of American Business Editors Conference Friday. (Photo: Mike Reicher)
The Obama administration’s executive compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg said Friday his program has worked well thus far and that he’ll be announcing a new round of pay restrictions next week.
Feinberg told a crowd of journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Convention in Phoenix Friday that the administration’s efforts to tame executive compensation may be swaying companies to do it on their own. “There are some small early signs that what I am doing will have a voluntary impact,” he said.
As the Treasury Department’s special master for executive compensation, Feinberg was tapped by Obama in 2009 to regulate the pay of top executives at companies that received the most federal bailout funds.
They originally included the insurer AIG, Bank of America and Citigroup, auto companies Chrysler and General Motors, and their former finance divisions Chrysler Financial and GMAC. BofA and Citigroup were removed from his purview when they repaid the taxpayer funds to the government in late 2009. [VIDEO AFTER THE JUMP]
What Journalists Got Wrong and Need to Get Right
Stephen Happel and Kathy Kristof discuss the business coverage on the financial crisis. Photo: Matt Robinson
News media got the greed of Wall Street right during the financial crisis, but need to get away from financial jargon and tell stories behind the numbers, according to a panel of economists and business writers.
The panel, at the annual SABEW convention in Phoenix, Ariz., discussed what journalists got wrong during the financial crisis. John Wasik, a freelance journalist, moderated the event with Stephen Happel, an economist from Arizona State University, Ali Malekzadeh, dean of the Williams College of Business, Xavier University, and Kathy Kristof, a personal finance columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
Some tips emerged for business journalists:
- Keep it simple: the word “derivatives” makes most readers skip to next story. “Think about telling the story to your mom,” Kathy Kristof said.
- Tell the stories behind the numbers: Each statistic has a ripple effect throughout the economy, each layoff – a story said Malekzadeh.
- Understand the Context: How do new firms determine how risky a new financial product is? “If you don’t understand the issue, you need to make more phone calls,” said Kristoff.
- Aftershock Stories With the economy losing a trillion dollars last year, school committees, city councils and transportation authorities still have many difficult concessions to make.
Kathy Kristof offers face-to-face meetings are one of the best ways to develop sources.
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