Subscribe to Ondisruption.com
The WSJ today offered a few more details on Mark Cuban's new website, ShareSleuth. The service will be focussed on busting corporate fraudsters. Cuban, who is a shrewd investor, hopes to profit from the detective work.
We examined Cuban's idea recently as an example of the creative new media services that can disrupt mainstream media such as newspapers. Says Cuban:
"I'm a firm believer that out of [the more than 10,000] public companies the odds are that there are more than just a few crooks and frauds," Mr. Cuban said Tuesday. "Finding them can be rewarding and entertaining..."
...Sharesleuth.com will launch next month and also carry work from a network of stringers that will include burned investors.
ShareSleuth appears to be setting up to perfrorm an important job that media consumers and investors are likely to value. This looks disruptive especially because many newspapers are faced with staff cuts due to declining readership and slumping ad revenues.
- Helps investors understand their investments;
- Creates value uncovering opportunities for short-sale of stocks;
- Different business model;
- Taps an underserved market;
It looks like ShareSleuth disrupts some elements of the investment industry, which showed weaknesses in research and independence in light of the wave of corporate fraud that occured since 1999.
Although one or two isolated analysts may have raised tough questions about Enron (or any other corporate fraud) early on, by and large, the industry dropped the ball on this kind of work, with the exception of a few specialty shops like Behind the Numbers.
**Late Addition/Other Views**
June 19, 2006: Mark Cuban says being "right is its own defense" with regard to perceived conflicts of interest at ShareSleuth.com. He knocks j-school purists for saying the service is a good idea but that he is “ruining” it by trading on the information. In Cuban's view, any new journalism service has to offer viewers a 'payoff' to make it worth their while, whether it is ShareSleuth or a venture he is trying to launch with veteran broadcaster Dan Rather. Although the word payoff may sound like some form of corruption, it is not. Cuban recognises that the media has to deliver something new and of value to consumers.
June 19, 2006: Chris Carey, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who is heading up ShareSleuth, offered some details on his plans and showed his track record in discussion at Paul Kedrosky's blog. As for ShareSleuth's plans, prospects for the quality of the journalism look good based on his past experience with reports on rogue brokers and their multinational boiler rooms.
June 15, 2006: The New York Times reports today that AOL's Netscape is refashioning itself as an online newspaper of sorts, compiling news reports, user-created content and adding its own content from a staff of bloggers, modelled after tech site Digg.com
June 14, 2006: Maybe Mark Cuban and ShareSleuth don't entirely disrupt the media market on their own, but these enterprises are not the only threats. As a reader points out, several web-based services are focussed on the business and investment news market, each offering something substantially better-focussed, better informed and more timely than daily newspapers:
- The Deal,
- The New York Times' DealBook,
- Breakingviews, formed by ex-FT columnist Hugo Dixon,
- The meta blog Inveslogic,
- Hedge-fund driven Seeking Alpha Network.
Each comes at the market from a slightly different but equally valuable perspective and each has a business model that is vastly different from mainstream media. From the other side, many other web properties are focussed on disrupting the advertising market, including craigslist, and of course Google's local ads (in beta.)
Comments