"Business reporters--like, I suspect analysts and venture capitalists--develop over time a set of diagnostic tools for analyzing the relative health of companies we encounter. This bag of tricks is mostly subjective, some of it no doubt unconscious, and we constantly test it against experience, most of it bad. That is, every time we get suckered into writing an upbeat story about an evil, incompetent or doomed company, we swear we will never make that mistake again--then we scrutinize where we went wrong and what warning signals we missed.
"This can make us seem cynical after awhile. But let me tell you: there's nothing quite like having some pensioner or widow tell you that they lost their life savings because they based their investments on one of your articles. You will never believe a corporate pitch again..."
