CJR: "WSJ Libor scoop, Business Insider, reader revenue"

The slightly deceptive headline is from the Columbia Journalism Review's The Audit blog, here's the story:

The Wall Street Journal posts an interesting page-one report on Deutsche Bank and the big profits it made betting on Libor, the critical lending benchmark rate it was helping rig:

The documents from the former Deutsche Bank employee set out how traders in London and New York working for the German bank’s global-finance unit successfully bet that borrowing costs in euros, U.S. dollars and British pounds over three- and six-month periods would rise faster than one-month interest rates because of deepening stress throughout the global financial system.

The interest-rate bets included an estimated potential profit of €24 million for each hundredth of a percentage point that the three-month U.S. dollar Libor increased compared with the one-month U.S. dollar Libor, according to the documents.
The former employee has told regulators that some employees expressed concerns about the risks of the interest-rate bets, according to documents. He also said that Deutsche Bank officials dismissed those concerns because the bank could influence the rates they were betting on.

— With 23 million unique visitors a month, Business Insider’s numbers are truly impressive, as is Henry Blodget’s willingness to share details of them with everybody.
But as Mathew Ingram writes, it’s impossible to know what they really mean without two numbers Blodget left out of his presentation: revenue and profitability.

While that’s impressive, however, Blodget hasn’t provided us with some of the most important data a media company needs in order to prove its health: namely, revenue and/or profitability metrics. It’s probably safe to assume that revenues are higher than they were almost two years ago, or the site would have shut down by now — and they may even be dramatically higher, since pageviews and unique visitors are still popular measurements used by many advertisers to determine success....MORE

Having observed Mr. Blodgett for over a decade, both at BI and in his prior incarnation at Merrill Lynch I've got to think that if he thought that releasing his numbers would, in any way, further his plans, he would.
The fact that he doesn't speaks volumes.