Berkshire Hathaway Shareholders' meeting

Dan Gillmor makes a good point:

Is there another big public company whose top people sit and take questions like this? #brk2010

My congratulations to their investor relations team who must have spent weeks preparing for this.

Also, some seriously good reporting by Gillmor with pithy comments at 140 characters at a time. Not so easily done.

XBRL and investor relations

SEC to Junk Paper Filings, Require Interactive Online Reports

Within two years, the SEC will require all corporations and mutual funds to file using a technology called XBRL (extensible business reporting language) with the first wave beginning in December. This transition coincides with the agency's plan to replace its document-based system, for collecting, analyzing and retrieving data, known as EDGAR, with an Internet-based platform, IDEA, short for Interactive Data Electronic Applications. ...

... To illustrate the system during a recent interview, Blaszkowsky sifted through volumes of financial information with a few clicks of his mouse, extracting data from several companies and creating a multicolor bar graph to compare the figures. Then he exported the data into an Excel spreadsheet. What took Blaszkowsky only seconds could have cost hours for a reader of current SEC filings.

"The centerpiece of our regulatory approach is giving investors the information they need to make wise decisions," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. "We have an opportunity to exponentially improve the way we perform that mission."

This will make it much easier to understand SEC filings and far easier for financial reporters and bloggers to report on it. Far more data will be publicly available in a form that is easily comprehended by the general public. Investor Relations practioners would be well advised to explain all this to management.

Investor relations nightmare

NEW YORK: Multiple parties are ramping up communications efforts this month in anticipation of the release of Sicko, Michael Moore's new film dissecting the US healthcare system.

Also being considered is a series of screenings for Wall Street analysts and hedge funds who, Lehane said, may want to see the film to help with investment decisions.

A truly novel way to promote a documentary. Michael Moore runs circles around the rest of us.

Reuters NewsScope

All The News A Machine Can Use

Called Reuters NewsScope, the product comes in two flavors: real time and archived. The real-time newswire lets subscribers scan live feeds from Reuters' global news coverage, monitoring for events that affect companies they're trading in. The archive lets the machines make sense of that information: When the tsunami devastated Southeast Asia in December 2004, for instance, here's how stocks X, Y, and Z moved.

"There's already an immense amount of content that explains price movements such as a stock split," explains Kirsti Suutari, global business manager for algorithmic trading at Reuters' enterprise trading division. "What's more difficult to do, on a machine-only basis, is to correlate price movements to something like Hurricane Katrina."

This is going to have a huge impact on the public relations industry, most particularly investor relations.