Facebook IPO shows galactic divide between investors

In the run-up to Facebook’s $16 billion IPO, Morgan Stanley, the lead underwriter on the deal, unexpectedly delivered some negative news to major clients: The bank’s consumer Internet analyst, Scott Devitt, was reducing his revenue forecasts for the company.

The sudden caution very close to the huge initial public offering, and while an investor roadshow was underway, was a big shock to some, said two investors who were advised of the revised forecast.

The point is that it’s not O.K. for banks to take the kinds of risks that are acceptable for individuals, because when banks take on too much risk they put the whole economy in jeopardy — unless they can count on being bailed out. And the prospect of such bailouts, of course, only strengthens the case that banks shouldn’t be allowed to run wild, since they are in effect gambling with taxpayers’ money.

Incidentally, how is it possible that Mr. Romney doesn’t understand all of this? His whole candidacy is based on the claim that his experience at extracting money from troubled businesses means that he’ll know how to run the economy — yet whenever he talks about economic policy, he comes across as completely clueless.

But, interestingly, this trend did not hold up in the “one Pinocchio” category, in which Democrats predominated (forty versus twenty-six). In other words, although the Post flagged Democrats for a lot of minor sins, the more egregious falsehoods were clustered among Republicans. (In checking one of President Obama’s statements, Kessler acknowledged it was such a minor infraction that it might deserve a “half-Pinocchio,” if there were such a thing.)

People are crazy. 

“The world is about to see Jeremiah Wright and understand his influence on Barack Obama for the first time in a big, attention-arresting way,” says the proposal, which was overseen by Fred Davis and commissioned by Joe Ricketts, the founder of the brokerage firm TD Ameritrade. Mr. Ricketts is increasingly putting his fortune to work in conservative politics.

The $10 million plan, one of several being studied by Mr. Ricketts, includes preparations for how to respond to the charges of race-baiting it envisions if it highlights Mr. Obama’s former ties to Mr. Wright, who espouses what is known as “black liberation theology.”

The group suggested hiring as a spokesman an “extremely literate conservative African-American” who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.”

A copy of a detailed advertising plan was obtained by The New York Times through a person not connected to the proposal who was alarmed by its tone. It is titled “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama: The Ricketts Plan to End His Spending for Good.”

The proposal was presented last week in Chicago to associates and family members of Mr. Ricketts, who is also the patriarch of the family that owns the Chicago Cubs.

Dianne O’Neal still lives on the rustic cattle farm that her husband’s family has owned since his great-great-great-grandfather purchased the land in the 1830s. She still stays in a log cabin built from chestnut trees that his ancestors chopped by hand.

But one aspect of the family’s long history here in northern Alabama is not so well preserved: Coffee Cemetery, an overgrown one-acre graveyard where the ancestors of her husband, Edward O’Neal, and their slaves are buried.

That has become a pressing matter in Florence because Walmart plans to build a store right next to the graveyard. The O’Neals’ biggest concern is that nobody knows exactly where their ancestors’ 80 slaves are buried.

The slaves were owned by Gen. John Coffee, a friend of President Andrew Jackson’s and a surveyor who drew the state’s border with Mississippi. And there is archaeological and historical evidence that suggests his slaves’ graves may be precisely where Walmart plans to pave a driveway to the new store.

TV is social. That much we know. What’s unclear is what will form the social backbone that enables it to come to life easily and seamlessly for viewers.

The obvious answer is Twitter and Facebook. There are new, dedicated social TV apps like GetGlue and Miso. But you can bet that the content creators, which have poured so much money into creating the content that binds this audience, want to have its piece of the action. That’s one way to read the news yesterday that CBS launched its own social platform, CBS Connect, as a way to tap into the social sphere and harness the conversations around its entertainment lineup.

According to Marc DeBevoise, gm of CBS Interactive Entertainment, the idea for a social hub grew out of its exploration with other social toe-dipping events, most notably its Tweet Week (where CBS talent would tweet back and forth with their followers) and Social Sweep Week (where stars would post and share videos, and video chat with select viewers) events. After seeing the success of these two experiments, The Eye Network placed its chips on a centralized location.

“The concept is aggregating social conversations — Facebook and Twitter — into one place around all of our shows, enabling people to slice and dice the conversations they want by show, character and actor,” DeBevoise said.

I got a peek behind the curtain:

Inside The New York Times building, there’s always a hum. And it’s not solely emanating from the multi-floor newsroom. It comes from the 28th floor, where Michael Zimbalist and his team of roughly a dozen staffers of the New York Times R&D Lab are sequestered from the rest of the The Gray Lady’s reporters, executives and staff. The NYT R&D Lab has the vital task of looking around corners and finding the future of how news and information will be delivered and consumed. Zimbalist and his team wanted to be in the building with the rest of the company but also wanted a distinctive space that would make it clear that the R&D folks are not part of the normal operations.

The R&D Lab looks at what the intersection of news information, consumer behavior and technology will be like in the next three to five years. There are some out-of-the-box projects, like its Surfacereader (a table-top news reader) and an in-progress database of New York Times content. The lab, up and running since 2006, would seem a curious luxury in an era of austerity in newsrooms, even at the Times. In fact, the company recently laid off 50 non-newsroom people. What’s more, it’s not as if the R&D unit hasn’t had any breakout successes in its seven years of existence.  It has.  But, according to Zimbalist, the goal of R&D is to understand how news may be consumed in the future and to push new ideas inward (rather than product development).

When even Huffington thinks a Democratic attack goes too far, it usually has. And yet a moment’s scrutiny reveals that her argument doesn’t make much sense. Why do we have election seasons, after all, if not to argue about which candidate would be better-suited to making decisions that put Americans in harm’s way overseas? How can we not politicize national security, given how central it is to the work of the modern presidency, and how unconstrained the executive branch’s national security powers have become no matter which party holds the White House?

These are the arguments that Hillary Clinton partisans mounted in defense of that “3 A.M. ad,” and that George W. Bush’s partisans mounted in defense of his 9/11-centric 2004 re-election campaign. And those arguments were right! It’s one thing to say that candidates shouldn’t impugn one another’s patriotism. But impugning a rival’s judgment, as the Obama camp’s Bin Laden advertisement just did, is precisely what a presidential campaign is for.

Contrary to popular belief, journalism is alive and well. The business model, well, that’s a different story. Part of it has to do with all the different ways we get our information. Part of it has to do with media sticking its collective head in the sand when it comes to adapting to the changing landscape.

That could start to change. One ambitious startup, Circa, wants to rethink the news model. It’s not yet launched, but Circa has attracted big-name backers, including Tumblr’s David Karp, Techstars’ David Cohen and David Tisch, and former Barbarian Group exec Rick Webb. The startup was cofounded by Cheezeburger CEO Ben Hunh, a journalism student turned savvy proprietor of shareable, fun Web content, and Matt Galligan, an entrepreneur who founded social aggregator Socialthing.

“I’d love to be pure digital, a printed newspaper is still by far the best way to consume news on the go,” said Webb. “The Internet hasn’t come close to cracking it yet. $149 a year is too much to read just the first two pages of The Economist. RSS is broken and my foray into aggregating a bajillion feeds to try and keep up didn’t work. But more than all of those, I think Ben and Matt have amazing insights into why all of this is broken, and what can be done about it.