Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Everybody's got something to hide (except me and my media firm)

It was simultaneously frustrating and encouraging reading from Picard about indicators of success for media companies -- encouraging to see how many of the indicators of financial and economic health are publicly available, but also frustrating to see how many of them aren't. It's always fun to tell reporting students how much they can find out about companies they're covering from their 10-Q's and 10-K's (if they're publicly traded) -- revenues, profits, debt, major projects, major ongoing lawsuits, percentage of the business that's in various markets or products, and so on.

But there's also so much that's hidden from those balance sheets, so much that could really give us a true sense of how that company is actually operating. I sometimes wonder if the accountants preparing those statements are snickering as they're writing about all the things they're not telling us ("If they only knew...").

For us as researchers, it's tempting to simply avoid asking some questions because we know the data needed to answer them would be so difficult to get our hands on. I read someone on Twitter a few weeks ago saying that we could solve the paywall debate in 2-3 years, tops, if everyone would just open up all their data on it for everyone to study and learn from. That's unrealistic, obviously, and it shouldn't stop us from trying to answer the parts of the question that we can get our hands on, and find more creative ways to get at the rest of it.

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