Bubble wrath.

• Position: Letters

Phillip J. Longman ("Bad Press," October) makes any number of thought-provoking points in his recent broadside at the failings of business journalism. But he is wrong to suggest that Fortune's coverage of AOL Time Warner has been tempered by the fact that we're AOL Time Warner employees. If he'd been willing to look at what we'd actually written, he would have found that shortly after the merger of AOL and Time Warner was announced, Fortune's Carol Loomis wrote a tough-minded--and quite prescient--story questioning the growth assumptions the merger was based on. Long before it became a public issue, Fortune wrote a story raising questions about some of AOL's accounting practices. We were the first to ask whether former CEO Gerald Levin left voluntarily, or was pushed by the board. And so on. We've also, in that time, written stories praising one aspect or another of the company's strategies--when we've felt praise was truly merited. The point is, AOL Time Warner is an important company for our readers to know about, and we work hard at covering it without fear or favor.

JOSEPH NOCERA Executive Editor, Fortune While I agree with much of what Longman had to say, I take issue with his snide characterization of the Industry Standard as a place "where reporters once took time off from chronicling the achievements of dot-com heroes to enjoy in-house massages and open-bar parties graced by belly dancers." Sure, the Standard benefitted from the once-frenzied advertising spending in the Internet sector. But to suggest that the quality of the journalism was anything less than fair, balanced, and skeptical would be inaccurate. Our editorial staff prided itself on taking the skeptical view. Even as Wall Street was cheering the sector on in 1998, 1999, and early 2000, we continually warned about the dangers posed by the euphoric optimism public and private investors were displaying about the future of the Internet business. Consider the following excerpt from the magazine: "Now, no one has more faith in the future of the Internet Economy than we do. But investors' voracious appetite for new Net companies is unsettling. How many online drugstores do we need? How many free ISPs? How many business-to-business auctions? While we admire the entrepreneurial spirit of all those startups, it's hard not to suspect that things will end badly."

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