Henry Blodget on his long fall from grace and ultimate redemption; opens up about his “colossal mistake” as a writer; defends slideshow journalism: “It’s native digital storytelling”

Henry Blodget on his long fall from grace and ultimate redemption

BY ADAM L. PENENBERG 
ON NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Henry Blodget was flying from Houston at the onset of the tech bubble when he started crunching numbers. As an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co., working in equity, he dashed off two reports on the plane. One was on an online retailer called Amazon, which was trading at $240, a price that many Wall Streeters in 1998 believed was way too high for a fast-growing yet money-losing startup. After running through the numbers Blodget came to the opposite conclusion, forecasted that the stock would trade at $400 a share, filed the report and didn’t think much of it.His prediction became a media event, leaving a trail of shocked stock watchers. Yet three weeks later the stock soared past $400 a share and Blodget became a poster boy for the dot com bubble, taking a job at Merill Lynch for a reported $12 million a year and becoming a celebrity with appearances on CNBC. A few years later his career on Wall Street came tumbling down almost as fast as the tech economy when the bubble burst. Then Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, came after Blodget for publicly touting stocks that he disparaged in internal emails. Then the SEC charged him with securities fraud. In a settlement Blodget paid a fine and agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry.

Blodget had become a symbol for everything that was wrong with Wall Street, an object of scorn, derision, and hatred, and this, he told Sarah Lacy at this evening’s PandoMonthly in New York, was an “incredible weight.”

“I felt terrible for my family who was hearing about it,” Blodget said, and apologized to his father who shares his name because it was being dragged through the mud. Through it all, he contends he was not — nor is he now — the greedy monster portrayed in the media. “I am certainly not the person that I am reading about and everybody I know is reading about every day,” he said,

Fortunately, he added, these were only professional and personal integrity disasters. His family wasn’t sick. He didn’t have an incurable disease, and people who have suffered far worse than him have bounced back “to do the amazing things.”

He said at one time, when he was an analyst, millions of people listened to him. “All that trust has been destroyed,” so now he would spend the rest of his life earning it back one day at a time from everybody who would give him that chance. “I understand not everybody will, and that’s OK. I understand. If all I knew about me was what I was reading about me I would be hateful and angry and skeptical, too.”

That’s when he decided to make a career change and move to journalism. He started his blog and began writing for Slate. I recall an especially astute op-ed Blodget penned for the New York Times in 2005 on economic bubbles. He pointed out that the Internet bubble paralleled that of other industries characterized by revolutionary technology. Specifically, he pointed to canals, railroads, telegraphs, telephones, cars, radios, and personal computers, which “progressed (or are progressing) through four phases of development: boom, bust, mature growth and decay.”

When I read it, I marveled how a guy viewed as a symbol of the dot com bubble had gone through his own boom and bust, and was just entering the mature growth phase of his career. Presumably at Business Insider he will have a long runway before he’ll face decay.

 

Business Insider CEO Henry Blodget defends slideshow journalism: “It’s native digital storytelling”

BY HAMISH MCKENZIE 
ON NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Business Insider founder, editor, and CEO Henry Blodget staged an impassioned defense of slideshows at PandoMonthly in New York on Thursday night, saying the visual format was part of a new type of storytelling native to the Web.

Business Insider, known for its mix of excited headlines and blog-style news and analysis, has copped a lot of flak over its four-year existence for milking slideshows for pageviews. One example of such criticism: a piece I published that made fun of Nicholas Carlson’s 50-page slideshow about his first Airbnb experience.

Blodget told Sarah Lacy that he wished the story that I would write is that Business Insider is innovating and that people need to acknowledge that the Web is a new medium, different from print and television. Slideshows are a great form of digital storytelling, he said, because people love pictures. Not everything has to be a 3,000-word essay approved by the Columbia Journalism Review.

He argued that products such as Snapchat are so popular, especially among younger people, because pictures are often more effective than text. “Kids don’t like to use words,” he said.

Slideshows, however, aren’t the be-all and end-all, he said. And straight text stories play well on the Web, too. But the Web allows more experimentation.

“There’s a dramatically different way of storytelling on the Web. You don’t have to do something different – it’s just there is a much bigger pallet in terms of storytelling tools.”

Indeed, the publication is far more than just slideshows. Blodget recently announced that it is investing “hundreds of thousands” in longform content, prompted in part by the success of a 22,000-word profile of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, which has been viewed close to 1 million times.

Digital readers are hungry for information all the time, he told Lacy. “It’s the mix that matters.”

By the same token, he also lauded another form of Web-native journalism. “The gif is awesome,” he said.

 

Henry Blodget’s opens up about his “colossal mistake” as a writer

BY DAVID HOLMES 
ON NOVEMBER 14, 2013

Business Insider founder Henry Blodget was our guest at tonight’s PandoMonthly, and it wasn’t long before the topic of his “Why Do People Hate Jews?” post came up. Blodget asked the question in earnest, but many interpreted the bluntly-worded headline as a grab for pageviews, particularly when his question could have been easily answered by Googling, “history of anti-semitism.”

So what does he think of the post in retrospect?

“A colossal mistake. One of the biggest I have made as a writer.”

But as for his other controversial posts, like his epic slideshow about his experience on an American Airlines economy class flight, he has no regrets.

“The moment I saw actual normal people reading it and saying, ‘I love this, this is really funny’ –then all of the journalists in the snooty journalism club saying, ‘Oh this is an outrage against our profession!’ — I was like, ‘That’s fine. I’m not writing for journalists, I’m actually writing for readers.’”