BusinessWeek Magazine is apparently a big mess. Media gossip website Gawker describes it as a "hellhole" riven by "internal backstabbing, sniping, and intra-office gossip wars."

Because we're of the belief that financial journalism can never have enough pretty girls, we're happy to bring you this video of an ambitious young girl called Brenna Hartwidth. She describes herself as a "financial service professional" and apparently wants to be the next Maria Bartiromo.

Video after the jump.

Jason Linkins obviously has a problem with Maria Bartiromo. We just can't figure out what it is.

In the opening sentence of his recent column the political columnist for the Huffington Post, Linkins attacks CNBC's Bartiromo on the grounds that she is getting older. At least that's what we think he's saying with his crack about her "collagen injections" being "widely reputed to be a key market bellwether." The odd thing is that we've never heard this reputed, widely or otherwise. In fact, as far as we can tell, no one has ever accused the star of having received collagen injections except Linkins.

But that was a throw-away line that Linkins probably imagines is funny. And harping on off-hand sexist remarks is hardly our thing. What was Linkins real objection? Oh, here it is: Bartiromo said some critical things about Barack Obama's tax plan.

After the jump, Linkin calls the female anchor "hysterical" (oh those hysterical women!) and then forgets to actually disagree with her.

Thorold Barker and Liam Denning write the all important Lex column for the Financial Times. Or they did. Today the news broke that Barker and Denning have been hired by the Wall Street Journal and will apparently be writing the "Heard on The Street" column.

Wall Street Journal hires Financial Times journalists [Guardian]

The announcement last night that key Murdoch aide Robert J. Thomson, who had been charged with selecting the next top editor of The Wall Street Journal , had pulled a Dick Cheney and selected himself, will have many speculating about the future of the Journal.

But why speculate when the evidence is right on the front page of the Wall Street Journal? Today's front page shows that the worst fears of Journal watchers--turning the Journal into the New York Post or even the Sun--haven't come to pass. But there does seem to be a shift in focus. Newspapers communicate their image of what is important with their front pages. And the front page story is a prized win for reporters, conveying prestige among colleagues. A few months ago the news desk at the Journal was split between general news and business news, and business news seems to be losing some of its grip on the paper.

Take a look at what's on the Journal's front page. Today there are six stories. The top billing is giving to the story of Ted Kennedy's brain tumor. The two other above the fold stories are about the quake in China and the US military. Below the fold we have a story about doping scandals in the Olympics. Of these, only the military story--they plan to use more alternate fuels--has a solid business angle. The rest are general news stories. Murdoch, who is said to favor more general news more prominently placed in the Journal, must be pleased.

The "What's News" section continues to lead with business and finance news shorts. For now.

It is well known that smart people—particularly the subset of the intelligent sometimes called intellectuals—tend to overrate the role of intelligence in providing solutions to social problems. This was on display in lurid colors in Gretchen Morgenson’s Sunday column in the New York Times lamenting the lack of “an intelligent and comprehensive plan for dealing with mass foreclosures and the economic consequences associated with the [credit crash] debacle.”

Morgenson goes to great lengths to draw comparisons to New York City’s bankruptcy crisis in the midseventies—which, as she says, was avoided in part by a cabal of government officials and bankers conspiring to refinance the city’s teetering debt structure. But she goes too far in reading a greater lesson into this story. It becomes almost a fairy tale of intellectualism, in which well intentioned intellectuals swoop in from their glass and steel perches to rescue capitalism from its tendency toward anarchy. The idea that no rescue plan outside of permitting market processes to operate is available is reduced to “doing nothing.” A better way must be available because “America is full of smart and caring people!”

We’re second to no one in our appreciation of the smart and caring—we’re not supposed to call them the “best and the brightest” anymore—Inhabiting these Untied States. Unfortunately, we have stubborn memories that insist on recalling the fact that the mortgage crisis that set off the broader credit crisis has its origins in the plans of the smart and caring to expand homeownership beyond the levels established through market processes. Perhaps its time to give “doing nothing” a chance.

Big Rescues Can Work. Just Ask New York. [New York Times]

Bianna Golodryga is apparently Washington DC’s favorite “money honey.” The former CNBC reporter moved over to ABC last year. But her appearance at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner is garnering her a lot of attention. “She’s smoking,” a Bush administration official tells Paul Bedard, who writes the Washington Whispers gossip column for US News & World Report.

“I was walking around with her, and all the big shots were coming up and introducing themselves. They were gaga over her,” a “financial industry source” tells Bedard.

The New TV Money Honey [US News]

This week may be the first real test for the Fox Business Network, TV Decoder’s Brian Stelter points out today. Market turmoil tends to drive up viewership for television business news, and FBN is running hard to catch the wave of attention directed at the rocky markets.

While CNBC was basically shut down yesterday, FBN carried the news of yesterday’s global meltdown live. CNBC, however, is responding with a two hour “Market Survival Guide” special that will air tonight from 7-9 PM. Because, see, CNBC is quick and nimble—like the Fed.

CNBC pulled out all the stops this morning, throwing Cramer on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to echo the sentiment of some traders that the Fed should cut another 50 basis points. Charlie Gasparino got a little rough, declaring that “deleveraging is a bitch.”

We asked Bess what Fox did this morning and she replied, “I didn’t go to Burger King.”

Stocks Down, Interest In Business News Up [TVDecoder]

We never quite understood how it was that Rupert Murdoch was supposed to ruin the Wall Street Journal. Or why he would risk throwing away the credibility of a newspaper for which he just paid $5 billion. A look at the capital spending of News Corp actually points in the opposite direction. Against conventional wisdom—and in the face of much analyst carping—News Corp has been lavishing spending on slow and slowing news outlets. Capital expenditures in the newspaper division have doubled since 2004—and that’s not counting the Dow Jones purchase. This isn’t a company or a chief executive who is out to destroy newspapers.

Or, at least, not newspapers he owns. There’s been some speculation that the hiring of chief neoconservative Bill Kristol by the New York Times—a move that has left many liberal readers howling with outrage—may be a move to ward off a more muscular Wall Street Journal, where the editorial page has long been a stronghold of the right. So could Rupert Murdoch’s perceived conservative politics actually be influencing not the paper he owns but its competitor?

If that’s the case, there are some who think that the strategy might backfire. Some Times readers don’t exactly love encountering “columns written by those with whom they disagree,” according to Steve Boriss. He goes on to explain that the liberal backlash against the Times could outweigh the growth in conservative readership.

“But for Times readers who can easily avoid daily exposure to conservative views, Bill Kristol will not only seem wrong, but also selfish, mean-spirited, and morally deficient,” Boriss writes.

How pissed off are the liberals over Kristol? Very. Over at City Journal, Harry Stein surveys some of the reactions. He quotes from one Huffington Poster who says: “I will never, ever, buy another issue of the newspaper, I will never again be a subscriber to your newspaper and I will do my level best to avoid any purchases from any NY Times advertiser.”

Murdoch gives the NY Times a Trojan Horse for Christmas: Bill Kristol’s new weekly column [Steve Boriss]

No Conservatives, Dammit!! [City Journal]

It’s that time of the year. And by that time we mean the beginning. But also the time of year when the lack of business news means the business media turns to lists to generate stories. The top 7 business stories of 2007. Best 8 investment ideas of 2008. The worst 20 things on Wall Street.

We’re hardly above this type of artificial story generation. Indeed, we’re busy as, well, bees at the height of honey season (whenever that is) putting together our list of top stories from the last year. (Send your nominations to tips@dealbreaker.com with the subject line: “Top Stories.”) We’re also going to put together a couple other special features to make up for the lack of stories other than “oil is, like, totally close to $100 a barrel.”

But in the meantime, we’re keeping our eyes on everyone else’s lists and other “of the year” features. Let’s start with Business Week’s “Business Person of the Year.”

After the jump, we reveal BW’s winner and why we think Jamie Dimon was totally robbed.

Is our beloved New York Post business section falling apart?

While the hoity-toity media mavens fretted that Rupert Murdoch would do something awful to their beloved Wall Street Journal—exactly what he was going to do or why he would buy a newspaper just to destroy it was never clear—the more enlightened among us worried about the fate of the business section of the New York Post. Would News Corp cannibalize the Post’s business section to bolster the Journal’s staff? Would they have an interest in keeping afloat two competing business news staffs?

The offices of the Wall Street Journal have been swirling with rumors as the paper gets ready for Rupert Murdoch to officially take control of its parent company, Dow Jones, next week. One persistent rumor has it that the Journal is going to abandon it's downtown offices in the World Financial Center for a location in midtown. But perhaps the most talked about rumors have been possible changes in the executive suites of Dow Jones.

Now Newsweek is reporting that it looks like Dow Jones Chief Executive Richard Zannino is leaving. According to Newsweek, Mr. Z is expected to announce his resignation sometime this afternoon. The move is a bit surprising since Zannino reportedly helped spark Murdoch's campaign to purchase the company over a lunch last spring. So what happened?

"Murdoch apparently couldn't, or wouldn't, carve out a role to fit the ambitions of Zannino, a former fashion industry and retailing executive. But Zannino, the first nonjournalist ever at Dow Jones's helm, will exit with a severance package worth at least $30 million," Newsweek writes.

The rumor mill also says that Robert Thomson, editor of Murdoch-owned Times of London, may be named to replace Zannino.

Update: It's official. Here's the short and sweet official statement: "Dow Jones & Company (NYSE: DJ) announced today that Richard F. Zannino, chief executive officer, plans to leave the Company after the closing of the acquisition of Dow Jones by News Corporation (NYSE: NWS, NWS.A; ASX: NWS,)."

Update II: Journal now reporting on itself: News Corp. is expected to name News International executive chairman Les Hinton as CEO of Dow Jones, succeeding Rich Zannino, who announced his resignation earlier Thursday. Times of London editor Robert Thomson will become publisher of The Wall Street Journal."

Shakeup at Dow Jones [Newsweek]

While we're on the topic, we might as well mention that Ben Stein also seems to have an inflated view of the role of economists at investment banks, and perhaps in the world. Most traders and brokers we know tend to regard their economists as irrelevant at best and hazardous at worst. They are used to economists taking positions that are unhelpful to their book or to their sales efforts. But they don’t mind that much because they don’t think many people listen to—much less follow the advice of—their economists.

“These guys are talking heads for us. Part of brand promotion on a grand scale. They might as well work for the PR department. They get the firm’s name out there but, internally, no one really trades on what they say,” one equity trader with over twelve years experience tell us.

Remember that party we didn't go to? You know, the Financial Writers Association's "Financial Follies." Well, apparently this parody of "the Office" was part of the activities. It's vaguely funny, and relatively well produced. Oh, and it comes from the people who make that Bloomberg terminal on your desk.

PS: Last night we were sitting in the same bar we always sit in, Tom & Jerrys on Elizabeth Street, when we noticed the girls next to us were talking about "Clerks." At first we were excited because girls aren't usually huge fans of the movie. But we quickly realized the girls were talking about friends who were clerking for judges. In short, they were lawyers.

"Are you two lawyers?" we asked.

"No," the girl with the short hair and oddly attractive smile lied. Eventually she half-recanted and told us that her friend was a lawyer. In truth, both of them were.

"Do you always lie when asked about being a lawyer?" we asked.

"No. Just to you." She probably thought that was funny. We just thought it was sad that her life as a lawyer had left her so bitter.

So. Anyway. We totally had a point when we began telling this story. What was it? Oh, right. Here it is: the girl with the longer hair was a lawyer but she doesn't practice anymore. These days she works for Bloomberg. So there you go.

While most Americans were enjoying our “jingoistic” holiday on Thursday, the Dow apparently dropped “substantially…amidst more credit crunch fears.”

Or, at least, that’s what the BBC’s Newsnight reported. And it was only after viewers informed them that the US stock exchanges were closed for Thanksgiving that they realized their error.

They’ve gone and apologized for the mistake. You see, they don’t really get around to the market information until the last minute and they simply overlooked the fact that they were reporting the news from the day before. Apparently, this has happened to them a couple of times. Now they have found a way to ensure against future errors. They are going to insert a note on the page where they write down the market information that will read: “MAKE SURE YOU CHECK THE AMERICAN MARKETS ARE NOT ON A HOLIDAY”

Market sentiment [BBC News]

Early this month, it looked like we were getting into another media driven financial panic. The chiefs of banks and brokerages had been toppled. The front page of the Journal reported that Jimmy Cayne likes golf, cards and maybe even a little pot now and then. And, on November 2nd, the Journal reported that the bank had "engaged in deals with hedge funds that may have been designed to delay the day of reckoning on losses." And just in case that was too subtle, the article drew a connection to Enron and Japanese accounting scandals.

Merrill's stock dropped after the story and the brokerage fought back. It pointed out that the story seemed to be riddled with holes, with anonymous sources making vague allegations. And now it looks like Merrill has won. The Journal has printed a correction.

This article was based on incorrect information that the Merrill Lynch & Co. had engaged in off-balance-sheet deals with hedge funds in a possible bid to delay the recognition of losses connected to the firm's mortgage-securities exposure. In fact, Merrill proposed a deal with a hedge fund involving $1 billion in commercial paper issued by a Merrill-related entity containing mortgage securities. In exchange, the hedge fund would have had the right to sell the mortgage securities back to Merrill after one year for a guaranteed minimum return. However, Merrill didn't complete the deal after the firm's finance department determined it didn't meet proper accounting criteria. In addition, Merrill says it has accounted properly for all its transactions with hedge funds.

We didn't exactly tell you so, but our Opening Bell sounded a skeptical note when the article was printed, as did Felix Salmon.

Corrections & Amplifications [Wall Street Journal]
WSJ Admits its Merrill Story was False [Portfolio]

The only excuse we have to offer re: just now mentioning what happened on Fox Business Friday morning is that we don’t watch Fox Business. Sure, we’ve checked out a few choice clips (50 Cent, Sammy Hagar, Lamb Chop and Jerry Springer all come to mind) but only because they were forwarded to us in convenient link form. The bottom line is that there are three TVs in the office and each one is spoken for (TV1: CNBC; TV2: Nintendo (and the answer to all your, “Why haven’t you guys posted anything?” comments); TV3: A Best of Carney clipshow that was spliced together in-house and plays on loop). We don’t TiVo FB because it’s the sort of thing that has to be experienced in real-time.

Which brings us to this: unless something really drastic happens, like Maria Bartiromo announces that Cutter Associates is buying half of Bear Stearns, or Kudlow and Company is replaced by Paulie Shore and My Biatches, or Charlie Gasparino finally cops to being a drug mule, or Joe Kernen discusses Aquaman, the fictional movie from Entourage as though it were real, CNBC is getting bumped. No longer can we afford to miss Fox Business Morning for Breakfast reporting that Apple is taking an 8 percent stake in chipmaker AMD, contributor Charles Payne analyzing the genius (/imaginary) deal, and Glick correcting the misinformation by noting that “It’s not Apple, it’s Apple Dubai? Apple Dubai? Oh, Abu Dubai.” Yes, yes, Abu Dubai, AKA Abu Dhabi. The best part is Peter Barnes’s magical recovery which, paraphrasing, went sort of like this: “Ohhh, okay, okay, Abu Dubai, which was discovered and named by the Germans in 1904, and of course in German means a whale's vagina.” Your move, CNBC. Transcript (via SAI) and video (via Valleywag) after the jump.

Remember that New York Times story about Maria Bartiromo and Citi that we tried to straighten out for you yesterday? (We had some help from Portfolio’s Market Mover blogger Felix Salmon.) Well, they’ve finally gotten around to trying to straighten it out for themselves but still don’t get it quite right.

Yesterday’s story confused Citi executive Bill Rhodes with a made-up person called William Rose and a sovereign fund from Qatar with a made-up fund from a consulting company called Cutter Associates. Easy mistakes: Rhodes does sound like Rose and Qatar is nonsensically pronounced something like Cutter. So you’d think this would be easy to correct.

But then you don’t work at the New York Times. This morning they mixed it up again. As Felix Salmon points out, the correction stumbles and gets the story wrong.

Sometimes we wonder what we might accomplish here at DealBreaker if we had the editorial resources of, say, the New York Times. We’re not even talking about the top editors and star financial reporters and columnists. (We’ve certainly never wondered what it would be like to work with Gret-Gret or Tommy Friedman, much less Krugie. Even our darkest moments have their limits.) We mean copy editors, fact-checkers and the like.

At the very least we’d have less comments pointing out that we’ve once again resisted the idiotic rule that forbids inserting a apostrophe between it and s when they are conjoined to indicate possession. And we wouldn’t forget important dates, such as Maria Bartiromo’s September 11th birthday.

But we do resist grammar and spelling on a regular basis. And we may even have screwed up a fact here or there. We are not only imperfect and forgetful, we forget our imperfections. We’ve been spending way too long today thinking deeply about Bill Carter’s piece in the Times today about Maria Bartiromo and Citi. Bess just subjected it to her, uhm, unqiue brand of analysis. And given our imperfections we hesitate to ask a couple of questions that might be embarrassing to their editors. Nonetheless, here’s what we didn’t understand in today’s article.

• The quote: “The Citigroup spokeswoman, Leah Johnson, said the company had no issues with Ms. Bartiromo’s coverage. She conducted a prominent interview recently with the Citigroup senior vice chairman, William Rose.”
• The question: Who the heck is this prominent guy called William Rose at Citigroup? Felix Salmon at Portfolio thinks he doesn’t exist. He thinks that Carter meant to refer to Senior Vice Chairman Bill Rhodes, who is in fact prominent.

• The quote: “I love this thing now called sovereign funds,” she said, meaning the large pools of capital amassed by governments in Asia and the Middle East, and managed by groups like Cutter Associates, an international investment firm. “I had the head of Cutter on and he said: ‘Look, we have $60 billion we want to put to work.’ I find that kind of stuff so exciting. I find it so sexy.”
• The question: This Cutter Associates has $60 billion they want to put to work? Aren’t they a company that helps financial companies out with technology ‘solutions’ or whatever? With offices in Boston, Toronto and London, the firm might have some money to invest but $60 billion seems unlikely. And although she's peppy, Maria's not on speed so we doubt she jumped from talking about sovereign funds to chattering on about a technology consultancy that found $60 billion at the end of a rainbow. But you know who does have $60 billion to invest? The Qatar Investment Authority, which also happens to be a sovereign fund so it fits contextually.

Now we don’t really blame Carter for these errors. Rose sounds like Rhodes, and maybe the Citigroup flack made the mistake. And Qatar—well, that’s just a guy and his newspaper falling victim by the conspiracy to confuse all of us by changing the way place names are spelled and pronounced. There is no chance that “Q-A-T-A-R” is pronounced as “Kudd-Er” in English except in an Alice in Wonderland world where words are pronounced however the rulers tell us they are, regardless of spelling and tradition.

As Citigroup Chief Totters, CNBC Reporter Is Having a Great Year [New York Times]

On Tuesday, we found ourselves wandering in and out of the Grand Ballroom at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was the annual Future of Business Media conference, but something annoying kept happening: business news was breaking. Merrill Lynch was, ahem, accepting Stan O'Neal's, uhm, retirement.

After writing about nothing else for days on end, we suddenly found ourselves cut-off from the information flow. We half-suspected Merrill Lynch had decided to get back at the media, which has played no small role in highlighting the troubles at the firm, making this move during the conference. Rationally, we know that's not true but our paranoid imagination is rarely constrained by rationality.

We looked around the room. It is called the Grand Ballroom but there was nothing grand about it on Tuesday morning. Long rows of tables, more seats empty than filled, jugs of tinny water. We scribbled on a pad of paper, "I see bored people." Media poo-bahs we were meant to recognize but didn't were talking about the future and the business and the media. We decided to leave the conference altogether in favor of some early afternoon drinks and intelligence gathering down at PJ Clarke's.

It was a crisp day down at the edge of the Hudson river. Wind blew across the water and chilled our ribs as we sat down at the outdoor tables with some Merrillistas. No-one was in the mood for food at Clarke's. It was drinks all around. And then another round, all around. There was a conspiratorial air in the, uhm, air. [Editor's note: "Air in the air." Really? That's the best you could do? JC: Yeah. Sorry.] The top man was out and it was clear that the battle to replace him had only just begun.

By the time we returned to the conference we had missed the lunch where Neil Cavuto derided the elitist obscurantism of that other business network. The food was all gone, save for some inedible granola bars and brownies. We completely lack a sweet tooth, so why bother? We tried to sober up from our liquid lunch by drinking coffee while we got the story on the lunch from Portfolio's Sam Gustin.

"I don't believe that business news has to appeal only to the pedigreed few," Cavuto said, adding that if viewers want to know "the price of tin in Malaysia," they can go to CNBC.

The panel we most wanted to hear was the final one of the afternoon, about the "disruptors" of business media. You know the type: the bloggers and other webby folk who don't obey most of the rules that have traditionally made business news boring. And what we most wanted to know is why no-one asked us to be on that panel. Most particularly, is there anyone working in business media more, uhm, disruptive than Bess Levin?

Unfortunately, we wound up missing that panel. So we will never know why no-one asked Bess to the dance. Our friend Cody Willard asked us to do a spot on his new Fox Business Network show, Happy Hour. It's filmed inside the Bull & Bear bar and is pretty much our kind of show. Of course we agreed but what would we be talking about? "Since you're at the conference, you can talk about the future of business media." Cody suggested. We didn't have the heart to tell him we had missed most of the conference in order to actually commit business media rather than just have people tell us about it.

At the last minute, we got bumped off Fox. Apparently they decided to talk about actual news rather than just the future of news. So we were in the Bull and Bear, with a Hendrick's martini or two...okay, maybe three but we barely touched the fourth one...watching the show rather than being on it. This, we decided, was probably a lot more fun anyway. And was pretty much the same thing as being at a conference about media, except with a better place to sit because bars are always preferable to conference rooms.

Our phone buzzed with a couple of text messages. It was Joe Dub from Opening Bell. The conference cocktail hour was starting and he wanted us to drop by. Gustin was there too. There was a chance that the cute girl from CNET was going to show up. Larry Kudlow was talking at the University Club. We were invited to the cocktail hour but not the dinner. More drinking, still no food. We felt like business media was trying to get us drunk, and like the best kind of cheap date, we didn't mind. It was going to be an exciting night.

Gustin, who seems to have a much more attentive day at the conference than we did, totally let us borrow his notes. So if you want to catch-up and the future of business media today, check out his report in Portfolio.

And we promise, next time we go to one of these things, we'll try to pay attention to learn about the future of business media rather just trying to be the future of business media.

Suddenly,Everyone Loves Business News [Portfolio.com]