I swear I was going to use some variant of this in my post today, but FINalternatives beat me to it.

Headline: “Sen. Dodd (D-Hedge Funds) Won’t Seek Reelection”

No word on Dodd’s future plans, but judging by the way things typically seem to work inside the Beltway, the word “lobbyist” comes to mind as a logical career choice.

Consider: A U.S. senator who is not a leader in the party earns $174,000 a year. Now, the average lobbyist salary, according to salary.com, is $96,000 per year. That’s the median. I’m not sure, but I’m guessing that includes all lobbyists, including those in some less-lucrative sectors, like ball-bearing manufacturers, the costume jewelry industry and the auto sector.

But let’s be real. Finance is where the money is. Richard Baker’s salary as president and chief executive of the Managed Funds Association was $1,015,560, according to MFA’s 2008 Form 990 filing with the IRS. That’s roughly double what Jack Gaine made in his last year at the organization in the same position.

Sometimes you’re lucky, sometimes not

Most stories in journalism are pretty straightforward. Something happens, journalists report it. Then there’s the “analysis” space. Journalists look at a topic more in-depth, to help readers understand the nuances. Very often journalists work on these pieces over longer periods of time, but whatever the time frame, the story is filed, reviewed, edited and eventually run. The journalist can’t always control when a story runs, or what circumstances surrounding the story may change between the time the story is filed and the time it runs.

Such was the case this morning at Reuters. At 12:01 a.m., a story with the headline “ANALYSIS–US Senator Dodd wades into financial reform fight” moved on the Reuters story feed that we get at HedgeWorld. It was a good analytical piece by Kevin Drawbaugh, one of Reuters’ Washington writers.

I can imagine the feeling Drawbaugh got in his stomach when reports began circulating that Dodd today would announce his decision not to seek reelection. I’ve had that same feeling myself as a reporter, when you file a good story, go home, and then wake up the next morning only to realize that events have made much of your work, and perhaps even the entire premise of your story, moot.

Give credit to Drawbaugh and his editors, though. Within hours he had completely recast his original story to accommodate the news about Dodd. By 10:05 a.m., this story moved on our Reuters news feed: “US Senator Dodd’s exit roils financial reform”.

It depends on what your definition of the word ‘word’ is

Can you trust a dictionary that considers the phrase “distracted driving” its “word of the year?”

I’m not sure. I use Merriam-Webster all the time, but now I’m starting to wonder.

So you want to be a hedge fund manager

Good opinion piece on HedgeWorld today by SkyBridge Capital’s Scott Prince about things to consider when starting a hedge fund. Although we reversed the byline and headline briefly, don’t let that keep you from reading.

Check it out here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 6th, 2010 at 3:59 pm and is filed under Wednesday's Random Shots. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.