Marek Fuchs
It was the best of times; it was the worst of times. It was the time to declare signs of a recovery in a long-troubled company. It was the time to declare that losses at that company overwhelmed any small signs of progress. It was a the time for two completely different headlines atop the same article about Blockbuster(BBI Quote - Cramer on BBI - Stock Picks).
The Business Press Maven is always pontificating about how you, the savvy investor, should avoid giving into the temptation of surveying the business world by scanning headlines. We'll get to what might be the ultimate proof in a moment, but first a reminder. Think of it as The Business Press Maven's Public Service Announcement about the dangers of headline addiction: No matter how busy you think you are, read down, read further than the headline, or you set your sorry self up for confusion. By some strange quirk in the practice of journalism, headlines are often not written by the people who write the articles but rather by editors. Because of space constraints (particularly in newspapers and magazines), the headline writer has to be pretty good to capture the gist of the article. Unfortunately, because of time constraints and because many times the writer of the article would yell mean things at him for misrepresenting the article, the editor rarely asks the writer to review the headline. When it comes to wire-service articles run in other publications, the problem is amplified. It is doubly difficult for the headline writer to get in touch with the journalist from the wire service.
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