Mark Cuban on business journalism

The Internet billionaire, who made a fortune selling Broadcast.com to Yahoo during the Internet bubble, has launched a journalism venture called Sharesleuth. The site aims to root out corruption among public companies.

In a magazine interview, he explains what's wrong with mainstream business journalism:

Despite the fact that most newspapers and media are making strong profits, they have become slaves to earnings per share and trying to grow them worse than Internet companies were to page-views, users, and revenue in the late 1990s. They are not looking to create the best newspaper or media companies; they are looking to get their stock prices up. I know this is a generalization, but I can’t think of a large media company it doesn’t apply to. You have companies financial-engineering with tracking stocks, stock splits, buybacks, dividends, debt, acquisitions. You never hear anyone anymore saying “We are investing to become the best because our readers/viewers/listeners want the best possible content.” It’s shocking to me that the CEOs haven’t said, “Stock price be damned, we are making money and increasing shareholder equity by being the best at what we do.” Right now everyone is so afraid of new media they may lose the foundation of their core competencies. It’s happening in media, in movies, in theaters, in sports, and when I see it, I see an opportunity and try to act on it if it’s interesting to me.

Source: Los Angeles CityBeat