Entries Tagged 'Writing Portfolio' ↓

I wrote a story in today’s New York Times about how Dow Jones has lost its spot in the Standard & Poor’s 500, getting replaced by GameStop, a shopping mall seller of new and used video games.

For Dow Jones, the demotion is but one more sign of the painful move into Rupert Murdoch’s fold. For devotees of Dow Jones, it’s bad enough that a king of the tabloids now takes ownership of the Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones is an iconic company, whose very name is synonymous with Wall Street. Yet because it now is no longer a publicly traded company, but instead merely a division of the conglomerate News Corp., Dow Jones has lost its spot on the stock market’s most influential index.

A story I wrote about what Rupert Murdoch might do with the San Francisco Web site MarketWatch.com is up today on Fortune.com.

Fortune has revamped its Web site, and it looks great. Now, instead of stories appearing to come from CNNMoney, you can tell that they’re by Fortune writers. I hope to contribute more in the weeks ahead.

I’ve got a story in this morning’s USA Today about how cell phones will soon have credit card information stored in a chip, so that you’ll only have to wave it over a scanner in order to pay for something.

While all the experts I spoke to said this is a very secure technology, there are plenty of skeptics out there, judging from the comments the story is receiving.

I welcome the skeptics. I’m a big fan of paying with cash myself.

The New York Times today published a story I wrote about how small businesses and individuals can outsource even mundane tasks to “virtual personal assistants” in India.

In reporting the story, I found many people using these affordable services in a variety of creative ways:

A woman in New Jersey who works for a health care company used the new services to investigate trends in pharmaceutical marketing. An entrepreneur in Toronto used them to build his Web site. A Web designer in Louisiana has them search for images he can use. A builder in Tennessee uses them to get statistical reports on vacant lots before he buys them.

A man in Cambridge, Mass., even started a business, TajTunes, in which he gets the workers to telephone people in the United States with singing telegrams for $5 a call.

I’m thinking I need to outsource the production of this Web site.