Sunday Column: Connecting the Dots in Libya

Connecting the Dots in Libya

WHEN I wrote on my blog recently about The Times's decision not to give front-page coverage to a Congressional hearing on the consulate attack in Libya, hundreds of e-mails and comments poured in.

While it is hard to summarize that much correspondence, the gist of it was this: The Times is ignoring the Libya story, and trying to protect the Obama administration, because of its liberal bent.

Conservative news outlets pointed to my post as evidence that The Times favored President Obama in its coverage.

My intention in writing it was far less grandiose. I wanted to make the case that the hearing had enough news value to display it on the front page - as most major newspapers did - rather than on Page A3. Jill Abramson, The Times's executive editor, and Dean Baquet, a managing editor, told me that the hearing did not break enough new ground to warrant the front page; they also said they were wary of its partisan politics.

The amount and vehemence of the reader response struck me as important. So I took two days this past week to reread all of The Times's Libya coverage since Sept. 12, the day after the attack.

I drew a couple of conclusions.

First, it is utterly wrong to say that The Times has ignored or buried the Libya story. As of Friday, editors had placed it on the front page on 18 days out of 38, sometimes with news, sometimes with analysis.

The coverage has been extensive, aggressive and sweeping. And I see no evidence that The Times is pushing the Obama agenda, overtly or otherwise. Many readers believe that it is, so I read with particular care on this subject.

Second, to be more critical, the Libya coverage has not consistently and effectively helped readers make sense of what is happening. The Times has not effectively connected the dots in a murky, fast-moving and difficult-to-report story.

I did see efforts to do that - most clearly in a strong question-and-answer article last Thursday by Scott Shane, a national security reporter. That article, however, did not appear on the front page but on Page A16.

And it came late in the game. The questions it tried to answer have been swirling for weeks. The article came about, according to Mr. Baquet and Susan Chira, an assistant managing editor, after Tuesday's presidential debate made it abundantly clear that confusion reigned.

The signal moment of the debate, in which the moderator, Candy Crowley of CNN, tried to fact-check a dispute in real time, had become the topic of a new round of partisan wrangling. The issue was whether the Obama administration had “cooked the message” by blaming what happened on protests over an obscure anti-Islamic video when in fact there had been a planned terrorist attack.

The impetus for Mr. Shane's question-and-answer article “came directly out of the confusion at the debate,” said Mr. Baquet. “Everybody agreed that it was necessary.”

It was. But addressing those questions earlier - weeks earlier - and placing the explanatory piece more prominently in the paper would have helped readers make their way through the thicket. (It was displayed prominently on The Times's Web site.)

Why didn't that happen?

“One of the hardest things to do on a running story in a political season is to get away from breaking news and to make sense of it,” Mr. Baquet said. When Mr. Shane is deployed to write such an article, he is pulled away from his beat, where The Times is trying to break new ground.

Still, Ms. Chira said, “I think we've explained it better than anyone. We've been very aggressive on the ground, and we've been trying to chart the political arc of the story as well.”

The editors said that The Times's efforts were concentrated on two questions: 1) Was there a significant security failure at the consulate in Benghazi? 2) Did the Obama administration have much cleaner, clearer intelligence than it told the American people?

“What did they know and when did they know it?” Ms. Chira said. “I'm obsessed with that - we all are. It's hard to get.”

But that is the aim.

“We want to render an ultimate verdict, but we don't have all the information to put that together,” Mr. Baquet said. “The ultimate piece is not yet doable, but it's an active target.”

Ms. Chira said another element is something that editors wrestle with daily: “How many times do you say the same thing?” That's a crucial question, and one that I might answer differently than top Times editors seem to.

Follow the public editor on Twitter at twitter.com/sulliview and read her blog at publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com.  The public editor can also be reached by e-mail: public@nytimes.com.

A version of this op-ed appeared in print on October 21, 2012, on page SR12 of the New York edition with the headline: Connecting the Dots in Libya.

This Week In Small Business: Looking Stupid on Twitter

What's affecting me, my clients and other small-business owners this week.

The Election: Binders Of Women

Small-business owners award a narrow victory to President Obama in the second debate, where it seemed the only good business is a small business. Of course, it didn't take long for someone to songify the whole thing or for these reviews of binders for women to appear on Amazon. Matthew Yglesias urges the candidates to stop talking about small businesses and income tax rates: “There are plenty of good ideas out there to spark small-business hiring, but to make them happen, politicians need to take a break from their obsession with arguing about the top marginal-income tax rate and look instead at payroll taxes and monetary policy.” J.D. Harrison writes a small-business guide to the upcoming election. A new survey from The Hartford finds that despite their views on the economy, small-business owners see themselves as largely successful. Oddly, gasoline pr ices seem to be dropping in important electoral states.

The Economy: Alarm Bells

Two Americans win Nobel prizes in economics. Business inventories increase, lifted by automobile stocks. Consumers are asking, “What fiscal cliff?” as retail sales and industrial production rise. Gallup says economic confidence is at its highest since May. Residential building permits are strong and housing construction surges. Manufacturing in the Philadelphia area expands, but the New York region continues to contract. A forecast says global steel demand will slow next year. Inflation is up. The federal deficit tops $1 trillion for the fourth year in a row. Third-quarter earnings season has just begun, but companies are already sounding alarm bells about the fourth quarter. Weekly unemployment claims rise sharply.

Marketing: 140 Characters of Stupid

Rachel Blaufeld says you should get out there and stop hiding behind your computer. Here are four simple ways to get more testimonials for your company. A new holiday card collection from Hallmark offers something for every business. More small businesses are turning to Facebook and mobile marketing to drive growth. Brad Smith explains why you need to start using Google+. Jack Wrigley compares engagement on social media to window shopping on Main Street: “You need to pick products or services you feel will cause someone to stop, walk in the proverbial door, buy what you're selling, and then tell everybody about it.” Gaz Copeland explains how to look stupid in 140 characters. Amy Porterfield alerts you to a little-known Facebook feature that can help you monitor customers and competitors.

Your People: Working From Home

Kaylie Astin says that the best employees don't work because they love their company or boss; they work to advance personal goals. Hospital workers are the least healthy workers. Amazon plans to hire 50,000 holiday employees and may enter the semiconductor business. Eric C. Sinoway has thoughts on when to fire a top performer who hurts your company's culture. This is how the worst employee ever went on to build a successful company. Here's why your employees shouldn't work from home. A new study says the shortage of skilled workers may be exaggerated. Here are the top 10 reasons first-time freelancers fail. The bloggers at Springwise share some outsourcing ideas.

Retail: Fashion Grows

Fashion is the fastest-growing segment of online commerce, and it's being propelled by a surprising source: men. Gartner says fake online reviews are becoming a bigger problem (Yelp has one answer). Here's how to turn your slowest foot-traffic day into the most popular day of the week. OpenTable is now offering mobile booking for restaurant customers. This is the danger of having a business van with sliding doors.

Cash Flow: A $41,500 Refrigerator

Here's why prepaying expenses may not be you r best option. Josh Patrick explains why you need to care about the cost of capital: “Owners have to come to a better understanding of what their financial drivers are and figure out ways to produce the needed returns. Or, if that can't be done, you can do what I did and decide the industry is never going to allow you to make the returns you need and find a way to leave.” This $41,500 refrigerator is the size of a small car. PayPal bolsters its credit offering for small businesses. The Boston Beer Company introduces a program to offer loans to small businesses (and a speed coaching event) in Los Angeles. Small businesses want better cash flow tools from banks.

Management: The Power of Criticism

Ben Horowitz explains how to make yourself a better chief executive: “It's important that you give people feedback because you want them to succeed and not because you want them to fail.” Deborah Shane wants to know if you are branding your competencies, char acteristics and intangibles. Nadia Goodman says criticism can drive you. This is how to create a healthy balance in life. Phil Simon says you are probably forgetting something before making that big speech. Amy Jo Martin explains how Nascar uses access to build loyal fans. Holly G. Green wants you to take her test to determine if you are in the innovation danger zone. Daniel Kehrer suggests five ways to make service part of your business. A new study says that the “Physical Internet” â€" a concept in which goods are handled, stored and transported in a shared network of manufacturers, retailers and the transportation industry â€" would benefit the economy and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Over half of global businesses are still constrained by paper invoices. Ashley Halligan suggests four steps nonprofits can take to establish a lasting partnership.

Red Tape: Does It Come With Fries?

Looming federal budget cuts are a big risk to small businesses that rely on government dollars. Michael Keating shares his thoughts on landing a government contract. The Internal Revenue Service offers a free tax calendar for 2013. According to this infographic, one in three small-business owners have been sued in recent years. Someone paid $9,995 for a gallon of McDonald's Michael Jordan barbecue sauce from 1992.

Around The Country: San Francisco Empties

MSNBC's “Your Business” host JJ Ramberg releases a book to help small-business owners hook customers. The American Beverage Association sues New York City over the mayor's soda ban. An Entrepreneur Roadshow at Rutgers Business School in Newark will discuss pitching investors, the media and retailers. San Francisco becomes empty in this time lapse video. Waste Management and Sam's Club team up to provide membership discounts for small businesses. The National Federation of Independent Business takes “I Built My Business” on tour. A guy falls 24 miles out of the sky.

Arou nd the World: A Can of Sardines

As penalties crush the rial, Iranians point fingers. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development said leading indicators for the 34-nation body point to “weakening growth in coming quarters” for most major economies. A can of sardines inspired Mark Ruiz - a middle-class, well-educated Filipino from Quezon City, just outside Manila - to begin his road to social entrepreneurship. The world's most expensive cocktail is mixed in London. China's economy shows signs of picking up after a seven-quarter slowdown. A Star Wars flash mob appears.

Technology: Bad Week On Wall Street

Wall Street is disappointed by Microsoft, Google and IBM. Intel forecasts a big drop in margins and AMD lays off 15 percent of its workforce. Heather Clancy has four more mobile app development resources for small businesses. Paul McDougall says Windows 8 beats the Mac but Brian Barrett advises against preordering Microsoft's Surface tablet. Here are a few other projects Microsoft is working on. Best Buy plans its own tablet. The Consumer Electronics Association releases a list of technologies to watch. A new report says small businesses are underestimating cyber threats. Take a look inside Google's data centers. As the smartphone-user population climbed over one billion this week, adoption of such wireless devices in the industrial environment is inching ever-closer to its own explosive growth period. NCR upgrades its point of sale systems.

Tweets Of The Week

@BobBurg
What separates the star #sales people & exceptional leaders is their unabridged focus on the *other* person.

@NThickett
Great sales people never sell. They solve problems! It all starts with great questions and listening.

‏@DonCooper
#Sales Tip: When prospects really trust you, they'll buy what & when you tell them to.

The Week's Bests

Jim Connolly says this is what every business owner needs to know about winning arguments: “I often see small-business owners arguing with their customers, clients and contacts - insisting they are right and the other person is wrong. They insist on winning the argument (imposing their opinion as the only valid one) rather than winning the client. That mindset is toxic to our business.”

Tom Ewer lays out his stress-free approach to business: “The fact is this - best laid plans often go awry. You cannot avoid that eventuality. Most adversities we face become nothing but a blip on the radar in time. So when dealing with business-related issues, consider them in a bigger context. How will this affect you in the long-term? Is your life's work being destroyed, or are your goals just being pushed back by a day or two?”

This Week's Question: Have you said anything you regretted on Twitter?

Gene Marks owns the Marks Group, a Bala Cynwyd, Pa., consulting firm that helps clients with customer relationship management . You can follow him on Twitter.

Have You Thought About Soliciting a Yelp Review?

Lots of small-business owners have experienced frustrations dealing with sites that post consumer reviews. In case you have ever been tempted to deal with those frustrations by soliciting positive reviews, an article published Thursday in The New York Times contains a warning: Yelp is running a sting operation to try to catch businesses that don't play by their rules. The story explains:

Like every Web site that depends on consumer critiques, Yelp has a problem with companies trying to manipulate their results. So it set up a sting operation to catch them. The first eight businesses - including a moving company, two repair shops and a concern that organizes treasure hunts - will find themselves exposed on Thursday.

For the next three months, their Yelp profile pages will feature a “consumer alert” that says: “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business.

Beyond the eight businesses sited, the story do es not indicate how widespread Yelp believes the practice of soliciting reviews to be. What do you think of the company's new, more aggressive stance?

And if you are looking for more information: Here's a small-business guide to managing your own reputation. And here's an interview with the founder of Yelp: “Talking to the Chief of Yelp, the Site that Business Love to Hate.” And here's a story of one restaurant owner's effort to deal with a bad review on Yelp: “Mr. Cohen Has a Beef.“

Stop Trying to Protect Your Business Ideas

As we near a wrap for Make Your Pitch, I want to address one of the questions that consistently came up from those considering making a pitch: “How do I protect my ideas?”

There is often a concern among business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs that when they come up with a new idea, they need to protect it so that it won't be stolen. This mind-set, however, is dangerous. Here are four reasons you should stop worrying about protecting your ideas.

Your Idea Already Exists: There are very few truly new ideas. Most ideas are an improvement or a different take on an existing idea. Regardless of how much is new, the chances are that if you have thought of it, others have as well. This is one reason venture capitalists will not sign nondisclosure agreements - many times the same ideas come to light, independent of each other, at the same time. What makes your idea different is you: the approach, the technology and the resources that you bring to the idea. The search engine idea wasn't new when Google was founded. What made Google different from and better than the search engines that came before it (like OpenText, Magellan, Infoseek and Snap) was that its creators simply had a different approach and a different set of competencies.

Being New Can Be a Problem: If you have a truly new idea, you are in many ways at a disadvantage. Being first to market means you have to educate consumers, and that can be expensive.

Most businesses face the challenge of grabbing consumer attention, and that's no easy task. If you also have to educate consumers about why they need a new product or service, you have to spend extra effort, time and capital. Often, a more effective strategy is to be a second or third mover in a space - let someone else spend the money to educate the public. Then, you can figure out how to do it smarter, faster or better. That's how Facebook crushed MySpace as a social network, and that's why Peapod still exists as a grocery delivery service while Webvan (and its erstwhile $1 billion valuation) is long gone.

The Value Is Not in the Idea: The competitive landscape is very different than it was 30 years ago, back when ideas had some merit on their own. Now, there are so many businesses out there, and so much information, that an idea by itself is worth zero.

There are many examples of stupid business ideas that have succeeded (the Snuggie, for example, which is basically a bathrobe that you wear backwards), and great businesses ideas that have failed. The difference always comes down to execution. No matter how interesting an idea, execution is where the value lies.

If you follow mixed martial arts, you are probably familiar with the Ultimate Fighting Championship. The U.F.C. was created by Semaphore Entertainment Group in 1993. As I explain in my book, “The Entrepreneur Equation,” it almost went bankrupt. Years later, two casino m oguls, Frank and Lorenzo Fertitta, along with Dana White, the current U.F.C. president, swooped in to buy the business. Less than a decade later, the U.F.C. was valued at approximately $1 billion.

In other words, the idea for a mixed martial arts league was worth nothing. It was the execution - or lack thereof - that created the value.

Sharing Ideas Makes Them Better: We often think that we have great ideas, only to take them to market and find out that they don't resonate the way we anticipated. Sharing your ideas helps you get feedback and make valuable tweaks. If you wait until you go to market to get that feedback, it may be more costly or difficult to make changes. Having potential customers weigh in on your ideas early not only can make them better, it can also generate buy-in from your customers. If they think they had a hand in shaping the idea, they may feel a sense of ownership and be more likely to champion it.

But most of all, remember that your idea will do you - and your future customers - no good if you never get it out there.

Carol Roth is a business strategist who has helped clients raise more than $1 billion in capital. You can follow her on Twitter.

In a Five-Part Series, The Times Movingly Explores Another America

In a volatile election season, with candidates going for blood and the volume turned up full blast, Dan Barry's five-part series makes its appearance in The Times like a visitor from a distant planet.

The “Donna's Diner” articles, which have been featured on the front page since Sunday, are quiet, clear-eyed and thoughtful. They make no violent assertions. They merely offer a window into the way many Americans live today in parts of the country that get little attention, except as places where swing-state voters remain undecided.

The stories offer that window through skillful storytelling about good people who are struggling to get by.

The series is, indisputably, very long. Its opening piece last Sunday was 4,000 words - beginning on the front page under an inviting headline, “At the Corner of Hope and Worry,” and continuing to two full pages inside.

I wondered, for a moment, if I had misunderstood. Five parts about a diner in Ohio? A total of almost 14,000 words?

Then I began to read about 57-year-old Donna Dove of Elyria, Ohio, who “maxed out her credit cards, cashed in her 401(k) and opened a business to call her own.”

You know this place: It is Elyria's equivalent to that diner, that coffee shop, that McDonald's. From the vantage point of these booths and Formica countertops, the past improves with distance, the present keeps piling on, and a promising future is practically willed by the resilient patrons.

And I will admit to being hooked. The two inside pages read like a short story.

Perhaps the most haunting piece is Wednesday's, in which the difficult subject of race is treated through a focus on Ike Maxwell. He is a one-time high school football star who now wanders the streets of Elyria shouting, and whose brother's fatal shooting by the police caused race riots decades ago.

Mr. Barry handles the subject matter, and writes about the people, with respect and sensitivity.

“This was not going to be ‘here's another dying Rust Belt city,' ” he told me this week, as he described how he came to decide on this particular diner in this particular city. (The photographer Nicole Bengiveno, whose fine work accompanies the stories, came across it while on another assignment and suggested it to Mr. Barry and his editor, Chuck Strum, a deputy national editor. Also important to the project were the deputy photo editor Meaghan Looram, the videographer Kassie Bracken and the multimedia journalist Jacqueline Myint.)

“The spirit of the people, their great pride â€" I was just enchanted,” Mr. Barry said. He and Ms. Bengiveno both spent a great deal of time in the small city over the past several months. Mr. Barry said he drove there “maybe 10 times,” staying for three or four days each time.

“The idea wasn't to find a sad place and tell you a sad story,” Mr. Strum said. In The Times, “we write a lot about people who have money to burn,” but the idea with “Donna's Diner” was to show a different America, one where difficult circumstances are balanced by enduring hope and optimism, against the odds.

The idea for the project began last year when the executive editor, Jill Abramson, told staff members that, in the coming election year, she wanted The Times to find new ways to look at the American economy and its effect on people.

“Dan took this almost as a personal assignment,” Mr. Strum said. He described Mr. Barry as someone with “an enormous heart and a lot of feeling for these folks.”

Ms. Abramson is justifiably pleased with the result.

“Elections turn on the balance between the hopes and struggles of the American people. Dan Barry's vivid reporting on Elyria, Ohio, brilliantly explores this balance at precisely the moment that so much political coverage focuses on candidates rather than the characte r of the country,” she told me.  Top editors felt its quality justified the generous amount of space in print.

She called the series “a majestic narrative, in words, pictures and multimedia, about Donna, her family and the people she feeds at the diner.”

The last part appears in Thursday's Times. It's well worth spending the time to read all five parts of this remarkable series and see the multimedia effort, too.

Jon Stewart Proposes an Entrepreneurial Policy. Don\'t Laugh.

The Daily Show

Jon Stewart said something provocative about entrepreneurship on The Daily Show a few weeks back - and it involved only a little cursing. The occasion was the Democratic National Convention, and while interviewing the former Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee, the host had this to say about the conservative talking point that taxes discourage “job creators” from taking big risks by pinching the rewards:

What we need to do in this country is make it a softer cushion for failure. Because what they say is the job creators need more ta x cuts and they need a bigger payoff on the risk that they take. … But what about the risk of, you're afraid to leave your job and be an entrepreneur because that's where your health insurance is? … Why aren't we able to sell this idea that you don't have to amplify the payoff of risk to gain success in this country, you need to soften the damage of risk?

Mr. Stewart says this at the beginning of the third part of the interview, which is only available online. (Warning: some profanity is involved.)

The Agenda has often wondered if decoupling health insurance from employment might encourage entrepreneurship. But Mr. Stewart is pushing a bigger idea here of a wide safety net for failure, and an associated trade-off between diminished risks and a diminished reward (presumably reduced by the higher taxes necessary to subsidize those risks). And perhaps one reason nobody has been able to sell that idea is because we 've never heard anyone advance it in the public square before.

Mr. Goolsbee, for his part, agreed on the narrower point about insurance. “The data do not support the view that cutting taxes a ton for high-income people leads to lots of jobs for everybody else,” he said. “The data back up your idea that not being able to have health insurance, not being able to have social insurance in general - that Social Security's going to be there to support your retirement; that when you retire, there's Medicare that's going to cover your medical expenses - lead people to say, ‘I don't want to take a risk, I don't want to go start my own company, because I've got to lock away some money [for] when I retire.'” But he shied away from Mr. Stewart's broader point. “That is a deep question,” he told Mr. Stewart, “and I don't totally know.”

As Mr. Stewart might say, the guy with the goofy name is right! It is a deep question. And for a country where civic leaders speak so enthusiastically and incessantly about nurturing entrepreneurship and innovation, it raises practical and philosophical issues about just how far we ought to go to do so, and at what cost. We'd like to know what you think.

First of all, what kind of risks could be mitigated or socialized with a failure cushion (I picture it brightly colored, and embroidered with comforting thoughts like, “Well, at least you tried” or “Better luck next time!”)? Mr. Stewart mentioned the risk of losing one's health insurance, which could be ameliorated by the new health care law, should it succeed in making affordable health insurance broadly available to people who cannot get insurance at work. It's possible, too, that crowdfunding may allow entrepreneurs to start businesses without putting their life's savings - or their homes - in jeopardy. What else do job creators put on the line when they open up shop, and how might the danger be lessened?

But even if we cou ld socialize the risks of innovation and entrepreneurship, as a practical matter, should we? Most businesses fail now, and that is with barriers in place that discourage starting new businesses. If those barriers were lowered, would the rate of failure grow higher, making the cost of success more expensive? Would the social benefits of success - jobs and spending in the economy - offset those higher costs?

Finally, suppose we do socialize these risks, in exchange for a somewhat smaller payoff: Would entrepreneurs still be interested in pursuing their ventures?

Has Google AdWords Stopped Working for Small Businesses?

Photo by Tami Chappell Tom Telford: “It finally hit me to ask, ‘Can I sustain this?'”

In 2010, Tom Telford's management company, Cedar Creek Cabin Rentals, was spending $140,000 a year on pay-per-click advertising to promote the 45 cabins in his charge in and around the mountains of Helen, Ga.

But pay-per-click advertising had become increasingly popular and competitive and that meant his costs had increased as well. In fact, to maintain his ranking in search results, he had to pay about $1.25 a click, about double what he paid initially. “The cost per keyword climbed dramatically over the years,” Mr. Telford said. “And it's still going.”

While Mr. Te lford raised the limit on how much he was willing to pay for his keywords, he says he didn't see a commensurate increase in sales. “For a while, I was spending more than I was getting,” he said. “It finally hit me to ask, ‘Can I sustain this?'”

As Darren Dahl explains in an article we've just published, it's a question more and more small-business owners have been asking. What has been your experience?