A Sucker for a Pretty Business Journalist

Hat tip to Sivaram for alerting me to Michael Lewis's review of Alice Schroeder's Buffett biography in the New Republic¹, "Master of Money". Lewis notes in the beginning of his review that,

Buffett has a long and happy history of admitting attractive, intelligent women into his life, which Schroeder describes without mentioning how neatly she fits into the pattern.

How she fits in the pattern, apparently, is that unlike other female business journalists -- e.g., CNBC's Becky Quick, and Liz Claman (now at Fox Business) who preceded her as the network's Buffett correspondent, Schroeder was intent on using her access to paint a warts-and-all portrait of Buffett as a person as well as as an investor. That leads to some interesting material, which is surveyed in Lewis's review. It's an entertaining read, as Lewis's essays usually are.

The photo above, of Warren Buffett and Alice Schroeder, comes from Khotanharmon.com.

¹Now that Condé Nast has pulled the plug on Portfolio, perhaps TNR will be a regular home for Michael Lewis's essays.

Where Left-Leaning Pundits and Bloggers Compare Notes

Interesting piece by Michael Calderone on The Politico yesterday, on how liberal commentators compare notes and hone their message, "JournoList: Inside the Echo Chamber". A few brief excerpts follow.

For the past two years, several hundred left-leaning bloggers, political reporters, magazine writers, policy wonks and academics have talked stories and compared notes in an off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList.

Proof of a vast liberal media conspiracy?

Not at all, says Ezra Klein, the 24-year-old American Prospect blogging wunderkind who formed JournoList in February 2007. “Basically,” he says, “it’s just a list where journalists and policy wonks can discuss issues freely.”

[...]

Last April, criticism of ABC’s handling of a Democratic presidential debate took shape on JList before morphing into an open letter to the network, signed by more than 40 journalists and academics — many of whom are JList members.

POLITICO contacted nearly three dozen current JList members for this story. The majority either declined to comment or didn’t respond to interview requests — and then returned to JList to post items on why they wouldn’t be talking to POLITICO about what goes on there.

In an e-mail, Klein said he understands that the JList’s off-the-record rule “makes it seems secretive.” But he insisted that JList discussions have to be off the record in order to “ensure that folks feel safe giving off-the-cuff analysis and instant reactions.”

One byproduct of that secrecy: For all its high-profile membership — which includes Nobel Prize-winning columnist Paul Krugman; staffers from Newsweek, POLITICO, Huffington Post, The New Republic, The Nation and The New Yorker; policy wonks, academics and bloggers such as Klein and Matthew Yglesias — JList itself has received almost no attention from the media.

A LexisNexis search for JournoList reveals exactly nothing. Slate’s Mickey Kaus, a nonmember, may be the only professional writer to have referred to it “in print” more than once — albeit dismissively, as the “Klein Klub.”

[...]

“You don’t want to create a whole separate, like, private blog that only the elite bloggers can go into, and then what you present to the public is sort of the propaganda you’ve decided to go public with,” Kaus argued.

The illustration above, by Matt Wuerker, accompanied Calderone's piece on The Politico.