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NEWS: New York Lists Media Blasters as Dissolved as of April 2011

Why are you satisfied with a story merely being factually correct? Do you understand the concept that a news item can lay out a succession of facts that are perfectly true, but when juxtaposed WITHOUT ANY CONTEXT can lead readers to jumping to conclusions that are not necessarily true?

hikaru004 wrote:

agila61 wrote: hikaru004 wrote: Businesses usually have accountants that handle this. True. While I have no direct experience with this, my wife's worked as both an assistant to a chartered accountant and as a GST tax auditor for the state of New South Wales, and I can assure you that having an accountant does not magically eliminate the complexities of a complex return. Yeah, but they also alert you to problems beforehand. If you're a business with a complex operation, seeing them in an interval not conducive to timely tax return filing is not "good business". And since they had a problem before, they should have been making corrective actions to insure that it didn't happen a second time. Obviously, that didn't happen and they got dissolved.

The fact that they will have an accountant that files their taxes doesn't change the fact that these kinds of problems are more likely in years with difficult returns than in years with easy ones. And it doesn't change the fact that we have no idea whether the problem arose from MB's side or the state's side, except for underlining that "MB's side" has more moving parts than some people may imagine.

ANN is not the New York Times. I'm tired of hearing all this stuff that Media Balsters did not respond by some ANN imaginary deadline. This story is not the Pentagon Papers. It's a story about tax filings in 2011. There is no particular timeliness to it. Would it have really hurt ANN to wait to hear the other side of the story? Media Blasters and ANN have both been around a long time. A little professional courtesy would have gone a long way in this situation to avoid harm to both parties.

ANN is not the New York Times. I'm tired of hearing all this stuff that Media Balsters did not respond by some ANN imaginary deadline. This story is not the Pentagon Papers. It's a story about tax filings in 2011. There is no particular timeliness to it. Would it have really hurt ANN to wait to hear the other side of the story? Media Blasters and ANN have both been around a long time. A little professional courtesy would have gone a long way in this situation to avoid harm to both parties.

I guess Chris Mcdonald thought John Sirabella's email address had "dissolved" too. It doesn't count if the email address bounces and you do not bother to send another or look up the right address.

I guess Chris Mcdonald thought John Sirabella's email address had "dissolved" too. It doesn't count if the email address bounces and you do not bother to send another or look up the right address.

Having slept on this, the one thing I wish was in the article was the provision in NY State law that allows a company to continue working towards re-establishment. There is significant detail given as to what being "dissolved" means legally, to the point that it sounds like MB was operating illegally for the last year. That missing piece alters the apparent position of MB significantly for those of us who read the article as it was posted.

I'm not sure what "context" you want anyway.

I didn't need ANN to speculate why the state of New York had listed Media Blasters as dissolved; what I could have used is something along the lines of, "...companies that find themselves in this position do have options to get reinstated.

Our efforts to contact Media Blasters have not been successful to date, so we are not able to report their position on this matter at this time. We hope to provide that information as soon as possible."

Yeah, I wasn't trying to indicate they hadn't, although I can see where my inclusion of that might be confusing. I only threw that in to indicate the additional information that I would have found useful could have come at the end of the article. Again, also true that they never indicated it was irreversible, but if you are a layperson like me, the way they structured the article really made the situation look dire. Perhaps you didn't need any further context, but I certainly did and judging by other comments, such as the one from Saffire that I quoted above, other people did as well. In journalism, more information is better than less, especially on a website where space/length is not an issue.