OK, so this column won’t be all about ME (!)—but it’s going to feel that way for a little bit. I apologize.

This June will mark my 15^th year as a professional journalist (20 if you include my freelance—with an emphasis on free—reporting on boxing for a small magazine called Boxing Monthly). But in my mind, my career started as a sports reporter for The Journal News, which used to be a fairly large daily newspaper that mainly covered the New York City suburbs of Westchester, Rockland, and Putnam counties. I quickly realized that except for a few jobs in the world, sports reporting is a largely vapid endeavor—somebody won, somebody lost, repeat ad infinitum…who gives a shit? I enjoy reading a good sports profile as much as the next guy, but writing “gamer” stories—a recap of a sporting event—for pennies on the dollar was enough to make me want to leave journalism.

Instead, I decided to stay in journalism, but went down a different path as I left sports reporting for the significantly more complex world of the finance beat. I was hired as a reporter at American Banker Magazine, which was then known as US Banker­­, the monthly sibling of the Monday-through-Friday American Banker newspaper. I joined in September 2007, right as the subprime mortgage crisis was really taking hold. In October 2009, a year after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, I arrived here at WatersTechnology.

This is all to say that I’ve had a front row seat watching the financial crisis unfold, the implementation of far-reaching regulatory regimes, the early days of cloud adoption on Wall Street, the growth of machine learning, and the advent of quantum computing and, uh, blockchain and cryptocurrencies—you know what, maybe sports reporting isn’t so bad, after all.

Over those 15 years, I’ve learned this: If you don’t have people paying for your content, you’re a dead man walking. When I started at WatersTechnology—then, simply known as Waters—our monthly magazine was everything, and we had this glitchy website just to say we had one. People read the magazine…that’s what they wanted. Our subscription model was quickly becoming antiquated. Eventually, things flipped, and today we have a few old-school, hardcore print enthusiasts, but 98% of our readers are mainly getting us online. As far as I’m concerned, we’re an online publication competing with the likes of the Financial News, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, much less the dwindling number of trade publications that decreasingly populate the market. Our monthly magazine is a nice-to-have, but every story in there can be found first online.

What hasn’t changed, though, is this: while the vehicles of information dissemination will change, people will always want informative and exclusive articles. What’s exclusive and informative will change depending on the individual, but when it comes to information, people will pay for value…so how do you figure out what’s valuable?

I hope we provide a valuable product—if you don’t think we do, please let me know: anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com—but this isn’t all navel gazing. No, this (finally) brings me to the first of two topics that relate to our coverage and my experience at newspapers and magazines.

The changing face of news

First, Max Bowie wrote a story about a few vendors that disseminate news stories through various means, but also directly on a terminal. In it, he quotes Douglas Taylor—someone who’s been in the information industry since the mid-80s—as saying that at the end of the 1990s, news represented 50% of a terminal’s value; today, he puts the number at closer to 25%.

You see, there’s this thing called social media and cesspools like Twitter—follow me to read my random boxing, snooker, and beer thoughts!—and many newsworthy events are first mentioned there and not via the Associated Press. Again, the way that information is disseminated will change. The key now, though, is to not only break news, but to provide context around news events.

If you can help a trader or portfolio manager to not just understand why that individual news story matters, but also contextualize the trends that the story hits on, your information becomes more valuable. So it is that on a terminal, event-driven, breaking news is no longer the biggest contributor to a news feed’s value, according to Taylor.

To highlight this point, Max speaks with MT Newswires, a startup called Alpha News Stream, and trading software vendor Sterling Trading Tech, among others, to see how the industry is evolving. The common thread is exclusivity and curation—creating news feeds that are “concentrated” toward specific users that are underserved in the market is the business model.

But what’s good content? A quick story from my sports reporting days: I was once told by an editor that I needed to cover more games involving Yorktown High School (about an hour’s drive, without traffic, from midtown Manhattan) because we needed to grow our subscribership in the area. We were also instructed to put as many names of high school athletes as we could in our stories. The thinking was that little Susie Collins’ parents would take out a subscription if their daughter’s name was regularly in the paper. The editors didn’t care about the quality of the story—just get the names in there, and those names should be located in Yorktown.

This was exclusive content, but was it good content? I wasn’t involved in the business, so I have no clue, but I do know that over the coming years the paper would hemorrhage subscribers and staff. (I soon left after that assignment—though not because of that assignment—and would later poach two other Journal News reporters to work with me here at WatersTechnology.)

Exclusive, breaking news is very important, but you also need to provide value. Not all exclusive news stories provide value—sometimes context is just as important as the headline. News providers are coming to understand this, and it’s something that alternative data providers are having to figure out in their own way.

The changing face of the office

One more story from my early days in journalism. When I started at American Banker, even as a lowly junior reporter that needed a second job to pay his bills, I had a magnificent high-walled cubicle. It was truly glorious. You could communicate with people, but you also had some privacy and you didn’t have to hear every little thing that the person next to you was saying.

When I joined WatersTechnology, we had shoulder-high (if you were sitting) cubicles, but we were spaced out so it worked just fine. Not a cubicle—and certainly not an office—but pleasant. Then the open floor plan took hold.

Soon enough, within a six-foot radius there were five other humans sitting next to me, and I could hear them talk on the phone, clear their throat, tap on the desk, and chew their fucking food. Actually, I could hear some people 20 feet away from me chewing their food. And God forbid you were near someone with a booming voice. I used to work next to an outstanding reporter and when he’d take a call (which would be often, because he was/is good at his job) I’d have to walk away or (and I’m not kidding) go underneath my desk so that I could hear my own phone conversation. He was an A-plus reporter, but my O-negative blood would boil.

And God forbid if you sat next to me. Not only am I loud, but I’d often go out to the White Horse and have a lunch beer (or two or three or…) or meet with sources at Barclay Rex for a cigar and then come back to the office. Additionally, I just like talking about politics, sports, pop-culture, and stupid shit like, fighting in their natural habitat, what’s the largest carnivorous animal (by weight) that you could kill with your bare hands? I’ve literally had shouting matches in the office over this question.

Oh, and because it was an open floor plan and I was situated near the break room, I could hear (and smell, you fish-microwaving muthafuckas!) everything going on in there.

Between being US editor of WatersTechnology and becoming editor-in-chief, I was named an “editor-at-large”, which meant that I had the salary of an editor, but no one reported to me and my sole focus was on writing. Since no one answered to me, I’d often work from home (or from the White Horse) because the office was too distracting. Right now I know what you’re saying: “Wait, you are bitching about working in an office, but you can work in a tavern?” Yes, absolutely. The music was on but not overbearing, and because everyone was talking, the noise was more ambient than me listening in on one individual talking (OR CHEWING!) loudly in an office. There’s a big difference.

Here’s the other thing: It wasn’t good that I was working remotely. You lose something. There’s something—and that something is tough to define—to be said about working in an office and the personal connection that creates. I always knew this to be true, but I certainly feel it more than ever today, one year into the pandemic here in New York.

Open floor plans, when done well, actually have lots of nooks and crannies—places to be alone with your thoughts. Most open floor plans are designed by people who have heard about Google’s offices, but have never walked around an actual Google office. These open plans are simply about maximizing an NYC/London/Hong Kong/Paris/Tokyo/etcetera office space by fitting as many people as possible into the particular space of a high-rise at the cheapest possible cost.

As a result of the pandemic, it is my hope that people will give office space design in major metropolitan hubs a rethink. Cubicles aren’t bad. Privacy isn’t bad. It’s a matter of the culture you create. It can’t ALL be open. Even open floor plans can be wonderful, but if you don’t understand the need for quiet and privacy, all you end up doing is alienating workers and making them feel trapped in the expanse of your “Silicon Valley” open floor plan.

Think I’m wrong, as always, let me know via email (anthony.malakian@infopro-digital.com) or we can meet at the now-open White Horse on Bridge Street.

The image above is “Monkey Preaching to Turkeys” by the circle of Christophe Huet, courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s open-access program.