The NY Times does it again...
This is a previous interview experience with the Times. — This is the column Randall Stross wrote for this Sunday.
Context & Ripple Effects
On the same December 18, 2005 Sunday that Randall Stross's New York Times Business column "Is Mark Cuban Missing the Big Picture?" runs, Cuban answers it on Blog Maverick by invoking a previous interview experience he had with the Times — turning the column into a dispute over how the paper characterizes its subjects. The framing question in his headline, whether the Sunday Business section or bloggers hold higher standards, sets this up as an accountability test rather than a rebuttal on the merits alone.
The pickup was modest but real: Rex Hammock at rexblog.com treated it as a lesson in "learning from Mark Cuban," reading the exchange as a demonstration of what happens when a columnist's subject owns a publishing platform. With no other reaction posts captured, the story rests entirely on the two same-day texts — Cuban's post and Stross's column — which is precisely why the comparison between them is the story.
First-order effects
- Readers of both pieces can check Stross's characterization of Cuban directly against Cuban's own account of his prior Times interview, since both texts are public the same day — the usual one-sided record of a profile or column no longer holds.
Second-order effects
- Times columnists profiling blog-owning executives now face a subject who can publish an instant counter-account to a large audience, raising the effective cost of loose paraphrase or selective quotation in Sunday Business.
Third-order effects
- If every quotable executive keeps a blog, mainstream business journalism moves toward a norm where any characterization can be contested in public within hours, shifting leverage in source relationships toward the people being written about.
The trend: In the mid-2000s blogosphere, prominent business figures are answering mainstream press coverage on their own platforms the same day it appears, making journalistic characterization immediately contestable.