| Billion Dollar Journalist Departs |
| Wednesday, 09 December 2009 13:53 |
 Saul Hansell, who played a pivotal role in preventing a billion dollar giveaway to Verizon in the stimulus, has taken the NY Times buyout. Buried in the Senate version of the bill was a 20% tax credit for fiber. Nearly all the money would have gone to Verizon because there are no other large fiber builds in the U.S. even if they did not add a single incremental job or line of fiber.
I had just learned from Verizon it was impractical for them to rapidly increase the FiOS buildout beyond the 3M lines they had already planned during the stimulus. I confirmed that under the terms of the Senate Finance Committee bill they would collect over $1B for what they were doing anyway without a penny of government money. (Bravo for building FiOS, incidentally.) I wrote the story, but was told the fix was in. Saul double checked with John Hodulik, the best analyst on Wall Street, and Jessica Zufolo, then not yet in the administration. Saul put the NY Times behind the story. I hear they tried to change the formula to only provide the credit for additional construction, but in the mad dash to pass the $700B deal, that didn't work out. To my surprise, the House-Senate conference killed it. I confirmed with one of the principals that Saul's story was crucial. He also did a three part series on why the U.S. was no longer tops in broadband, calling people around the world to understand why France, Japan and Britain were succeeding. It was the best researched article I've seen in years. He found out from Mike Fries that the DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade could cost as little as $20/home, so would be done rapidly almost everywhere. He destroyed some of the "common wisdom" in D.C., that only made sense because of the army of Verizon & AT&T paid advocates. And too many more to list. Unlike too many journalists when he made a mistake he went back and did another story in depth. Karl Bode of DSL Reports wrote up one Saul got wrong. Shortly after, he followed up in depth and got the story right. Very rarely did he make mistakes although nearly all his work was original. He put enormous effort into research, sending questions all weekend and around midnight when he was on something hot. Covering the same beat as Saul has been like taking a master class. He researched more, analyzed more, and wrote better than anyone else covering telecom in the U.S. except perhaps Om Malik. Mike Arrington, who has regular dust-ups with the Times, called him "legendary." He's joining AOL as first employee of SEED, their new content management system. Watch for some major surprises. |
| Last Updated on Monday, 14 December 2009 18:04 |