So Fortune magazine is cutting back its issues to 18 from 25. But don't panic. According to the Wall Street Journal, the new Fortune "will become more of a lush-looking premium product." It will have a "sharper focus on the long stories" that have been the magazine's trademark and offer...

Tim Geithner, I know what you did last summer. And last spring. And most of last winter, too. That's because the media is obsessed with your calendar and with using the Freedom of Information Act to obtain it.

The New York Times started the trend in April, when it...

Did you watch Charlie Rose last night? According to the latest issue of Fortune magazine, you probably did. "The Charlie Rose Show" (or "Charlie" as "folks in the financial district" call it) has apparently become the TV destination for those who are looking to stay informed about the economic crisis,...

So here, in a nutshell, is what we've learned from reading deal coverage of late: M&A is back! Lots of companies, including many we've actually heard of -- Dell! Disney! Kraft! Xerox! -- have announced deals over the past few weeks. This is good. It means CEOs are feeling more...

Like Top 10 lists and year-end retrospectives, anniversary stories are a convention of journalism that just won't go away. So last week we were forced to endure an avalanche of coverage dedicated to re-enacting, re-analyzing, re-reporting, but mostly, regurgitating the fall of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. one year after the...

Since this is The Deal's 10th anniversary issue, we initially planned to discuss how much has changed since we penned the first Media Maneuvers column back in 1999. In those days, we were primarily concerned with how deal news was reported in, or in most cases, purposefully leaked to, certain...

Thumbing through the Aug. 31 issue of Fortune magazine, we couldn't help but notice that one of its features sported the byline of Ram Charan. This seemed odd to us because Charan isn't a Fortune staffer or even a journalist; he's a management consultant/guru/author who has been lovingly profiled...

Back in June, BusinessWeek announced that it would put out a special issue on "The Case for Optimism" this August, explaining that it's just as rational to see the economic glass as half-full as it is to view it as half-empty, so why not embrace the positive and...

I don't know what the Federal Reserve is. I don't know what they're doing."

So admitted comedian-commentator Bill Maher on his HBO talk show a few weeks ago, expressing a sentiment that, judging by the applause, was shared by many members of his presumably well-educated, media-consuming, studio audience. One of...

Say what you will about Matt Taibbi's piece in Rolling Stone on the evils of Goldman, Sachs & Co., one thing is for certain -- this story has legs. Long ones. Like a vampire squid's tentacles, perhaps. (Sorry, we couldn't resist.) Nearly three weeks after hitting the newsstands, Taibbi's invective...

Among conspiracy theories, the one about Goldman, Sachs & Co. controlling the world is about as hackneyed as they come. We can all recite the list of Goldman alumni who were behind the mega-meltdown: John Thain, Bob Steele, Robert Rubin. We've all watched a clique of former Goldmanites engineer the...

"Welcome to Your Daily Smack Upside the Head."

So reads the opening salvo of The Cheapskate Blog, a new offering from the folks over at Time.com. The blog -- the latest in a long line of media endeavors dedicated to the joys of frugality -- promises to help readers save...

When Bank of the Wichitas named its online unit Redneck Bank -- "Where bankin's funner!" -- it was looking to garner some free publicity for its Internet bank. Well, mission accomplished. The folksy name has been covered by a slew of news outlets, including, most recently, The New York...

Feeling blue? Depressed? Worried about your economic future? Well, BusinessWeek has some advice for you:

Snap out of it!

That's right. The magazine that brought you the blog "Recession in America" before we were officially in one is now rolling out "The Case for Optimism," a special project that will...

"I just wasn't paying attention."

"It never even occurred to me to mention it."

What do these two statements have in common? They were both uttered by New York Times journalists as they tried to explain away behavior for which they recently came under fire. The first was offered by...

So the blogosphere's verdict is in. New York Times' economics reporter Edmund Andrews' tell-all about his personal credit crisis, which ran in the newspaper's Sunday magazine, is brave. Courageous. Unflinching. A must-read. "Bravo to Andrews for leaning into the strike zone and taking one for the team," cheers...

Picture this: Citigroup's Vikram Pandit (or Bank of America's Ken Lewis or Wells Fargo's John Stumpf) decides that the question-and-answer session at his annual meeting will be handled differently this year. Instead of fielding an uninterrupted stream of potentially wacky queries from a vast shareholder audience, Pandit (or Lewis or...

So The New York Times got its hands on Timothy Geithner's day planners and was shocked -- shocked! -- to find that as president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Geithner, now Treasury secretary, spent lots of time meeting and eating with big-cheese finance executives.

OK,...

In 2008, the financial media was saddled with an enormous task: explaining the unexplainable. The subprime mortgage mess, which began life as a seemingly isolated problem in a much larger market, had morphed into a crisis of epic proportions that would take down two Wall Street firms, a handful of...

We feel poor. Stressed. Depressed. We're trying to hold on to our jobs and pay our bills and not fall behind on our alphabet soup of a mortgage. Our nest eggs are cracking, our home values are plummeting and we're in credit card debt up to our shiny little iPods....