The parade of stupid journalism at the NYT's Business section continues. Last week, NYT regurgitated the AP report on Apple's (AAPL) quarterly report which mistakenly forgot that iPhones are MP3 players, and to count the total number of MP3 players sold one has to ADD the iPhones and the iPods to see what the real number is. People who buy iPhones don't tend to spend another $300.00 on an iPod, after all.

Today, it was Starbucks (SBUX) turn for a ride on the NYT Business Spin-O-Rama. Their article "Overhaul, Make It a Venti" was another example of trying to make the story fit the buzz rather than look at the situation objectively. To which the NYT got this letter from me:

Editor:

In the shaping-of-news-to-fit-the-story department, your story “Overhaul, Make It a Venti,” by Michael Barbaro and Andrew Martin, appearing in the January 30, 2008 edition of the Times’ Business Section, was yet another shockingly bad piece of spin journalism.

The story of the Brave Little Coffee Company, Broadway Café, that chased out the big, bad corporate Starbucks, was used to illustrate the challenges that Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz faces in getting the company back to its roots.   Mr. Schultz’ mea culpa on that subject over the summer aside, the thing that your crack team of reporters missed in this spin-tale was ubiquity: A cup of Starbucks coffee, and the experience of sitting in a comfortable, clean, familiar enviornment is the same in Miami, Singapore, and Round Rock, Texas.

While Broadway was reveling in its victory, Starbucks dropped new units across South Florida, driving Gloria Jean’s a smaller competitor, out of key locations in local malls and establishing its foothold as a neighborhood coffee store in places that don’t have one.   Like a all corporations, Starbucks is not immune to closing stores.  The example cited by your reporters is hardly emblematic of anything other than their desire to tell the story in their own way.

To be fair, the bigger question to which your business section should have committed the ink was: Did Mr. Schultz step in to appease his own ego? No one even questioned Starbucks’ corporate momentum until he did. In his quest to make Starbucks more “custom” on a local level, will he upset that ubiquity of taste, service, and environment that makes people like me drive right past Broadway Coffee just as lunch goers seek out a McDonald’s rather than the local burger barn?

For the prior screw up, I received a letter from one of the NYT business editors that told me that, to be fair, WSJ and the FT also made that mistake.

To which I replied: When my kids tell me that 'somebody else did it too' as an excuse, I tell them to stand up on their own two feet and take some personal responsibility.

NYT's Business section is becoming a journalistic lightweight. For their perceived gravitas, their budget, and prior reputation, hiring a better raft of editors and journalists with some investigative skills rather than a covey of regurgitative hacks would go a long way to improving their credibility.