Maven: Missing the Big P

With apologies to Columbia University Journalism School's finest, if you are not making much money on a TV, flat or otherwise, you can't make it up on volume. This seems obvious, but apparently, it isn't. Sometimes The Business Press Maven thinks that students who plan to report on holiday sales during their career should spend time running a hot-dog stand on Broadway.

Now Best Buy is getting crushed and investors are rightfully nervous about Circuit City(CC Quote) and other companies that rushed to get their pinkies in the pie of fancy TV sales, such as Home Depot(HD Quote), Wal-Mart(WMT Quote), Office Depot(ODP Quote) and more.

Though The Business Press Maven still thinks that, on measure, the Christmas selling season will be a decent one, investors could have been saved the trouble of tumbling stocks like Circuit City if the media's collective focus at the outset had been on the bottom line, not the top.

Speaking of bottom lines, here it is for investors: Beware of Q&A formats. Nothing benefits corporate officials trying to spin their way toward undeservedly higher stock prices than having a major publication essentially run a transcript (read: self-justifying rant, advertisement) of what they say.

The business media can be total flatfoots in terms of critical thought, as I will be (well, always am) the first to say. But the only thing worse than the business media is no business media, and that's largely what you get in the Q&A format, in which the journalist can ask a follow-up question perhaps, but loses the opportunity to put quotes in proper perspective.