A Business Reporter's Death

Opening up the Portfolio e-mail account today, I found this message from a reader:

“Mark Pittman died. Your lack of a mention on Portfolio.com is noted you stupid (insert foul word or phrase here).”

I didn’t know Pittman, though I certainly knew his work as a business journalist. He was seen as being at the forefront of reporting on the nation’s most recent economic collapse and he’s credited with waging a battle to force the Federal Reserve to be more open. He won that fight in August when the Manhattan Federal Court ruled the Fed needed to be more forthcoming with details about its $2 trillion loans to financial institutions.

Bloomberg, where the 52-year-old Pittman had worked since 1997, today published a glowing tribute to him. The story by Bob Ivry quotes Joseph Stiglitz, the winner of the 2001 Nobel Prize for economics, as saying Pittman was “one of the great financial journalists of our time.”

“Mark Pittman proved to be the most fearless, most trusted reporter on the most important beat during the 12 years he wrote about credit markets, corporate finance and the Federal Reserve at Bloomberg News,” Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief Matthew Winkler said.

I wondered why the person who emailed us was so angry that Portfolio.com hadn’t reported on Pittman’s death. A quick search found that Pittman’s passing hadn’t gotten much attention—no obit in the New York Times, for example. I got my answer about midway through the Bloomberg piece.

His June 29, 2007, article, headlined “S&P, Moody’s Hide Rising Risk on $200 Billion of Mortgage Bonds,” was excoriated at the time by Portfolio.com for “trying to play ‘gotcha’ with the ratings agencies.”

“And that really isn’t helpful,” said the unsigned posting.

Pittman’s story proved prescient. So did his reports on U.S. banks exporting toxic mortgages overseas, on Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson’s role in creating those troubled assets while he was chief executive officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and on the U.S. bailout of American International Group Inc.

Felix Salmon, who wrote the Portfolio.com post, today offered a post on his Reuters blog headlined: Mark Pittman Was Right. "Sorry, Mark. In hindsight, your story was indeed prescient, and helpfully aggregated a lot of the well-founded worries that the subprime crisis was going to get much, much worse, and that none of the ratings on subprime CDOs could be trusted," Salmon wrote.

I could also make a number of defenses about the work Portfolio.com did in its early days (the blog post Bloomberg cites came in about two-and-a-half months into our first life as a Conde Nast publication). I could make the argument that bloggers often make snap judgments—they do, after all, have a lot of space to fill. And I could note that in June of 2007, not many people were sounding the alarm that the economy was in deep trouble.

None of that matters. What does matter is that Mark Pittman was doing the kind of provocative journalism that treads new ground and rings alarms. As business journalism gets downsized and stated opinions seem to matter more than the facts they’re based on, it’s important to remember what one talented reporter can do. And it’s crucial Pittman’s approach to business news isn’t forgotten.