http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mark_Cuban&action=history

Cuban is a deeply troubled man.

I typically like what you write. Sometimes I think you overstep your boundaries, because all though your tone would suggest otherwise, you are not an expert on all subjects. Whether it’s smart or dumb money, Cuban’s got more money than you’ll ever have and for you to slam him like this seems entirely out of bounds.

It’s funny as someone who is very active in the blogsphere it would seem that you’d be aware that Cuban’s biggest frustration with most of the basketball stories written about him and his team are incorrect because the writer never actually called or emailed Cuban for his take on the given subject. I can’t imagine that you’ve read his blog with any sort of consistency without having noticed this once or twice. That being said even if you were going to make the claims that you did above, why the heck didn’t you at least get in contact with Mark and get his pov?

You have a great blog and it’s clear that you’ve got a good thing going, so keep up the good work. If you want to keep the blogsphere aware of what other bloggers, more informed in the ways of shorts, longs, and the like about Cuban that’s one thing, but your commentary on the subject is essentially worthless given the fact that you won’t be making the Fortune 400 this year and he will. That being said, I think you should stick to media commentary and let the people who know how to make the money give the advice on what’s right and wrong about what Cuban’s doing.

That’s the problem with Evslin’s application: it can only detect the bandwidth available on any pair of end-points, not the delay or jitter, and even if it did measure jitter it wouldn’t know how to interpret the results. You don’t know why Skype doesn’t work from your home because the effects of cableco intentional degradation are indistinguishable from the effects of your neighbors downloading lots of porn. That’s why the issue for Skype isn’t bandwidth, it’s QoS.

So don’t ban QoS, you need it.

Anyhow, who has a commercial motive for producing good-quality investigative business journalism? My guess is the subscription model works best, because it has the most direct connection between customer and product. Like the Wall St. Journal, only more detailed. So we need a user-supported service that only sells if it produces solid information and analysis.

The tech press failed us miserably during the bubble, and we don’t want that happening again with Bubble 2.0.

Can you say, “Conflict of interest”?

Cuban buys stock in a company. Share Sleuth dumps on the company. Cuban publishes Share Sleuth. What could be wrong with this picture?

Who the hell are you to decide whether it’s dumb money or smart money? Like George Soros said, “it doesn’t matter how many times you win or loose, what matters is how much you make when you win”.

You can criticize Mr. Cuban all you want, the fact is that he sold Broadcast.com for 4 f**king billion dollars! & has a profitable team, Mavs, so those two successes outpace his failures.

Find someone new to pick on, enough with the good cop bad cop charade.

Jon and Richard on alternatives: Great and needed discussion. That’s the essence of it. I think there are alternatives:

* Force business reporters to be more than flack regurgitators. Use the new Thomson roboreporter to write the damned earnings results stories. Link to Business Wire for the damned press releases. Forego the damned cuddly features. Fire the present business staffs. And bring in some investigators. The only problem there, of course, is that newspapers are shrinking and don’t have much in the way of business staffs anyway, since business sections have sucked for a long time. But there have to be some egotistical editors who would see this as a path to prizes.

* As I mentioned above, I think Sharesleuth and services like it could be supported by advertising. The audience there is smart and involved and rich and there are no end of financial advertisers; every newspaper — every newspaper — wants more business inventory.

* As I also mentioned above, I think Sharesleuth could be supported by public contributions.

* I would bet there are foundations that would support Sharesleuth.

* I would bet there are rich guys who would support Sharesleuth…. without turning profiteer behind its curtain.

* I like your suggestion, Jon, that this be turned into another opportunity for networked journalism: as the Sunlight Foundation has people scouring Congressional earmarks, so could the public scour public business documents for smelly fish. In a sense, of course, that does happen now on Motley et al. What’s interesting here is that this would not be for stock touters (save short-selling touter in reverse, I suppose); it’s all negative all the time. I imagine this could be formatted better (e.g., telling the public what to look for exactly, fill-in-the-blank-style) and use data smarts (find all companies with this or that characteristic).

What the exchanges and the SEC can do, I don’t know. I’m concentrating on this from a journalistic perspective.

One thing is certain, Mark is so Smart enough to make his fortune from dumb money. He’s smart enough to make AOL see gold out of trash.

Mark is the best, ShareSleuth is crafted by a Genius. You may call him Lex Luthor if you want, but he is one hell of a mind. He doesn’t need the word “buzz” in a machine, he is buzzing more than you’re machine man.

I really do think that Jeff is pushing for clean journalism here. My reasoning here is this: the other stock-fraud investigators and business writers (whom Jeff cited) are engaging in competitive jousting as well. It’s in their interest to dump on Cuban’s project, too. And we can chalk up a lot of BuzzMachine’s blogging to a bit of competitive jousting. But it’s a judgment call.

I wish though that someone would take bite of the bigger picture: are their alternative means of preventing securities fraud?

[My last comment was blocked, so rather than wait for Jeff to unblock, I'll repost sans links here: ]

Ok. I read the ShareSleuth article, all the comments to it, 6/22 article in the New York Post, and the Motley Fool article (both of these were days after XNL joind the AMEX board), and all of the comments here again. I checked out the Google and Yahoo stock pages for XNL. I am also absolutely floored that the wikipedia entry has remained virtually unchanged (asides from a link to the SharedSleuth article).

I can’t argue the ethics further. I’m curious about the journalism angle.

1. Is the current state of business journalism absolutely incapable of doing this research and calling it like it is? NYPost and Motley Fool were on the sniff of the trail. And in the sleuth comments I read about “citizen” efforts like StockLemon which have been doing this for years.

2. Should there have been due diligence on the part of AMEX prior to listing the company? (from what I understand, AMEX is easist to list on) Why not encourage a friendster-style mapping services– call it FRAUDSTER (sorry, the domains are taken)– which lists information gleaned from public records: business dealings, court filings. The whole point of filing this information with the government in the first place is to make it easier to connect the dots. Sounds to me like what you’ve been calling “networked journalism.”

Of course, Cuban and Jarvis are libertarians– they wouldn’t be keen on such an encroachment of communitarianism!

(I assume, if the US intelligence community has done anything at all over the last 5 years, they’ve starting setting this up privately. So might as well do it better– and out in the open– on a public site).

One of the problems with blogging is that so many people with big audiences in this Internet-driven media think they must understand all about the Internet itself, but that makes no more sense than believing that the New York Times staff knows how to grow trees, make paper, and design a high-speed web press. If they can grasp the fundamentals of soy-based inks they’ve come a long way.

Cuban’s enterprise has dubious legality, and the idea that it’s some sort of “journalism” freaks me out because it’s obviously true, just as it’s true that Jon Stewart, Bill Maher, and that Cobert guy are practicing journalism of a sort.

So what does that say about regular journalism that no line can be drawn between it and naked profiteering?

I tricked another magazine to publish one of my comics. This time it’s Punk Planet. The current issue (75) has a theme: The Revenge of Print 2. I was asked to contribute a 3 page comics essay on the topic. It ended up being an apocalyptic rant on the …

Dan Gillmor flagged the sharesleuth launch two months ago, but, in Dan’s nice-guy tone, it “raises serious questions” and only made him “uncomfortable.”

I mean, reading through Cuban’s original post, he’s doing this because he wants to restore “journalism with a payoff.” Like in the old days, the payoff is the Mike Wallace doing “gotcha” on the malfeasant. In today’s media, the payoff is a monetary one– to Cuban! Good thing billionaires can’t be bought. But lesser soles may try this tack.

I’ve been critical of Jeff in the past for his scoffing at journalistic standards in the name of noble amateurism. Lately he’s been warming towards standards, so I’ve applauded him, as I do here. I’ve passed this along to the ONA mailing list (it costs only $50/year to join) and I’m curious what people say. I feel ashamed enough that I didn’t raise this beforehand (and suggest instead invite Jill Carroll to speak).

One thing that from Jeff’s post that made me laugh out loud:
“Well, actually, I’ve sat in public meetings with Times editors as they talk about the cost of maintaining a Baghdad bureau and that is not a financially motivated decision.”

Yeah, I sat in on that meeting too, though I don’t remember a multiplicity of Times editors, it was just Jill Abramson defending herself against Dave Winer. It could have been a different meeting. Were their no meetings from the Advance days where news budgets were discussed?

That’d be a payoff.

Cuban’s a weirdo, that’s a matter of public record. The Mavs won the first two games of the NBA finals, and then went on to lose it all to the Heat. Something strange must have been going on behind the scenes, because they were clearly the better team.

But sometimes it takes a weirdo to bring things to the surface that otherwise escape the public’s attention. We can’t count on altruism to provide the funding for citizen journalism, there needs to be somebody involved with a commerical motive. Cuban’s is self-serving, plain to see, and pretty greasy.

But who’s got a realistic alternative?

You’ve been consuming your own koolaid for too long. Papers don’t add non-revenue papers to serve the public good, they serve their long term profit or personal interest. It could be a brand building exercise (especially for a paper geared to be profitable), or it could just be to reinforce a position (for a vanity press like the political mags), but either way it serves a private interest just the same way that paying for some tarty story is in the private interest of a UK Red Top.

Journalism exists for 3 reasons: make money, advance politics, and advance socially (or at least not fall socially). They’re all private interests though are helped by claiming public spirited motives, and the second motive usually leads proprietors to be so self deluded as to conflate their private interests with the public interest.

As to Sharesleuth… it’s an interesting dilemma, compounded by the fact that Cuban is frequently an ass. He does highlight some of the problems in the market that people need to be more aware of.

Cuban also opposes network neutrality regulations, which you and Newmark support. In fact, Newmark as been a poster boy for net discrimination through the false story about Cox Cable shutting their customers out from accessing his ads, which was finally cured by the correction of Craig’s List’s server configuration.

Your story about Cuban raises an interesting question, so it would be a shame if the Newmark issue became too much of a distraction. I’d rather have people discussing the expansion of insider-trading laws than these other issues, frankly.

At the end of the day, Cuban will wrap himself in the First Amendment just as the pornographers do. So that’s the issue that deserves our attention.

I took a closer look at Mark’s addendum to his first report and got the following, “My intention is not to cover based on any short-term swing in the price of either stock. I will stay short until there is a material change in the operations of either company. My goal is to never have to cover.” So, if he follows his strategy, there are no short swing profits. If the stock goes to zero, he never needs to cover. Your case is the most interesting one with ambiguity. (The other is that he loses his stock borrow and gets “bought in”. In this case, it’s involuntary on his part and can be reported after it happens.)

I figure he has a four choices. First, he can cover and not mention that to anyone. That’s a dirty, unethical move, more so if the story stays up. Second, he can publish a mea culpa and cover afterwards. I consider this to be a “legal fees minimizing strategy” and I also see it as ethical. Third, he can sit on the position and choke. Not highly likely. Fourth, and most interesting, is that he can cover first and let everyone know later.

Is the fourth choice necessarily a conflict of interest? It’s still the “perception” but boy is it a strong perception! In this case, given the damage that he’d have done to the principles and shareholders of the firm, I’d think he’d be obligated to do his mea culpa first. By the way, the stock would probably be going through the roof before he writes as investors start to see evidence that he’s blown it.

His decision about the reporter must be based upon all the facts. It’s easy to be wrong in this business. He shouldn’t stop the story. He should print a retraction.