Covering a Crisis on Wall Street

One headline painted Sunday as a "momentous" day for Wall Street; another called it "frantic." Either way, coverage of Sunday's striking developments in the U.S. financial system was fast-paced and breaking.

By late Sunday The Wall Street Journal was reporting that Merrill Lynch had agreed to sell itself to Bank of America for roughly $44 billion. The story posted Sunday, but with a Monday dateline, said the deal would show "how the credit crisis has created opportunities for financially sound buyers. At $44 billion, or roughly $29 a share, Merrill would be sold at about two-thirds of its value of one year ago, and half its all-time peak value of early 2007. Merrill shares changed hands at $17.05 each on Friday, after falling sharply in the wake of Lehman's looming demise."

And it was the Lehman Brothers' story that consumed much of Sunday's coverage. The company's possible liquidation, after potential buyers Barclays PLC and Bank of America walked away from negotiations, had Wall Street scrambling and reporters tasked with not only covering the day's events but also investigating possible Monday morning market impacts.

The New York Times called Sunday a "frantic" day in its package, which received top billing on the paper's Web site homepage. In addition to stories on each of the day's deals and non-deals, the Times offered a look at what could come on the Jittery Road Ahead. The piece explores a comparison of the present scenario to the stock market crash in 1987. One interviewee is quoted as saying, "This is welcome back to Black Monday," but others said such talk was "overdone."

WSJ.com provided a look at the day from every angle including analysis for investors from its regular bloggers and columnists.

In fact, bloggers played a key role in the continuing coverage across the board. The Wall Street Journal's Deal Journal and MarketBeat both had news analysis pieces including the The Mother of all Mondays, which examined the possible market impacts and was updated throughout the night as news developed and global markets opened for trading.

DealBook, a blog from The New York Times, took on similar form and also posted a farewell e-mail obtained from a parting Lehman executive.

The Los Angeles Times utilized blogs as well, giving readers a bullet-point breakdown of Sunday's events including the sale, the potential bankruptcy, AIG's scramble for funds and the action by a group of 10 major banking firms to prevent "markets from seizing up on Monday because of a shortage of liquidity." The online presentation offered readers an easy primer to a day of historic events, and the comments were as interesting a read as the news itself - a snippet of the real-life investor frenzy.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism