John Gapper says that he sees "a
sort of consensus" emerging between blogs and newspapers.
The boundary between old media and new is falling and the distinction between
blogs and print publications is eroding…
I imagine the two sides will eventually meet in the middle, even if it is
not clear where the meeting-point will be.
In the wonderful world of In Theory, I daresay this is true. In the day-to-day
world of In Practice, however, it isn’t. And with your indulgence I shall now
embark upon some epic financial-media navel-gazing. I won’t be offended if you
stop reading here, I promise.
First, it’s worth emphasizing that finance, as a subject, is not easy to write
about for a general audience. In fact, I can’t think of a single news organization
which has consistently managed to write about finance in a manner which is neither
incomprehensible to the layman nor condescending to financial professionals.
It’s a rare and precious skill, and interestingly one person who I think does
it better than almost anybody else is a blogger: Tanta, at Calculated
Risk.
Now I’ve written
glowingly about Tanta in the past, and she definitely has her enemies. Some
think she’s biased when it comes to the mortgage industry; I don’t agree. The
NYT’s Gretchen Morgenson (a frequent target of Tanta) is more biased than Tanta
is, more prone to thinking the worst of mortgage bankers. Others complain that
Tanta is intemperate, and in that they are correct. Read one of Tanta’s blog
entries on Morgenson, and you almost want to go dashing over to 43rd
Street 8th Avenue with some bandages and a nice cup of tea. When she
gets her teeth into a newspaper article she thinks very little of, Tanta pulls
no punches – and, I assure you, those punches land square, and hard.
Now Tanta’s actually been blogging at CR for less than a year, and her first
media post – which was about Morgenson, natch – came on March
5. What’s interesting about it, aside from its content, is that fact that
although she drips a bit of sarcasm here and there, she doesn’t have the take-no-prisoners
approach she later
Meanwhile, she was and is happy to heap
glowing praise on other reporters when it’s deserved.
Tanta has written about many different journalists, by name, over the months.
Some she’s been ruder about than others. But I have a feeling that not one of
those journalists has actually engaged her, thanked her for her insights, defended
their reporting, or in any way tried to collaborate with a woman who clearly
knows an enormous amount about the industry and who is equally clearly dedicated
to really uncovering the truth of what is going on out there.
I use the word "collaborate" deliberately, because it’s the word
that New York Times executive editor uses in an
email to Jeff Jarvis:
My respect for blogs as a tool of journalism is not the least bit grudging,
and my conviction that professional journalists should collaborate with their
audience is heartfelt. That’s especially true when you have an audience
as educated and engaged as ours.
You just can’t get more educated and engaged than Tanta. So why isn’t
the NYT collaborating with her? (I must admit that I don’t know that the NYT
hasn’t reached out at all. I don’t read all Tanta’s comments, and I certainly
don’t read her private email. But I doubt that there’s very much in there from
gretchen@nytimes.com.
Keller also says, in the speech
which prompted the email to Jarvis, this:
We get things wrong. The history of our craft is tarnished down the centuries
by episodes of partisanship, gullibility, and blind ignorance on the part
of major news organisations. (My own paper pretty much decided to overlook
the Holocaust as it was happening.) And so there is a corollary to this first
principle: when we get it wrong, we correct ourselves as quickly and forthrightly
as possible.
I can hear Tanta’s hollow laugh from here. No impartial observer, looking over
Tanta’s history with Morgenson columns, would say that Morgenson never "got
it wrong" – but as far as I know, no corrections have been forthcoming.
The NYT is great at correcting small things like misspelled names, and every
so often Keller himself will write what he calls "mea culpas for my paper
after we let down our readers in more important ways". In between those
two poles, however, if there isn’t an aggrieved subject agitating for a correction,
nothing tends to appear.
Interestingly, Keller actually diagnoses one of the problems with Morgenson:
I think you are more likely to present a full and fair-minded story if your
objective is not to bolster an argument, but to search out the evidence without
a predisposition – including evidence that might contradict your own beliefs.
Once you have proclaimed an opinion, you feel compelled to defend it, and
that creates a natural human temptation to overlook inconvenient facts or,
if I may borrow a phrase from the famous Downing Street memo, fix the facts
to the policy.
Tanta probably couldn’t have put it better herself.
But the thing which really bothers me is that while Gapper sees professional
journalists and bloggers converging, I look at the short history of Tanta’s
blogging and see them moving further apart. She’s become increasingly shrill:
when she finds a piece of journalism she thinks very little of, even when it’s
by a respected journalist such as Peter
Eavis, she tends to shout, and should loudly.
The shrillness of Tanta’s tone then gives her victims every reason not to respond.
Everybody knows there’s no reasoning with readers as rude and truculent as Tanta.
(Although this line of argument would be more convincing if journalists at places
like the NYT and Fortune ever responded to blog entries about them:
in fact, however, they tend to ignore even the very polite ones.) In turn, Tanta
feels increasingly like a voice in the wilderness: shouting is what people
do when they think they’re not being heard.
This gulf is not easily bridged. I don’t expect for a minute that Ben Stein
will stop by here and respond to my posts about him: he probably lumps me in,
if he thinks about me at all, with the green-ink
brigade. Hell, I don’t even expect my colleagues at Portfolio magazine to
respond when I write about their articles, with the noble exception of Jesse
Eisinger. And I’m a professional journalist, blogging under my own name, for
the website of a mainstream publication. Imagine how much harder it is to get
a response if you’re a media outsider, blogging under a pseudonym, at a blogspot.com
address.
Meanwhile, although I am quite sure that I’m taken much more seriously by financial
professionals than Ben Stein is, it’s Stein, with his pulpit at the NYT, who
seems to be able to have the
chairman of the Senate Banking Committee at his beck and call. That’s nothing
to do with Stein, and everything to do with the power of the New York Times:
it’s unthinkable that Dodd would have done what he did had Stein been writing
for any other publication. (And indeed Stein did precious little reporting for
his column: he relied mostly on an
Allan Sloan piece from mid-October, which got no traction at all on the
Senate floor.)
If you have that sort of influence with the truly powerful, your incentive
to slum it in the blogosphere is much reduced – unless that’s something
you actively enjoy. And some big-name journalists love it here: Paul Krugman,
for one, loves mixing it up with econobloggers and is generous too about linking
to them.
(It’s worth noting that Krugman writes for the NYT editorial page, which means
that he is not part of Keller’s domain; he can criticize
Stein with impunity. The business section’s DealBook blog, on the other
hand, excused
Stein’s column on the grounds that he was "half joking" –
try telling that to Chris Dodd. It also said that Stein had "attracted
much criticism" while somehow managing to link to none of it. While Keller
is proud of his website’s blogs, most of them are still far from being really
bloggy – they’re edited, for one, and they almost never allow themselves
to get involved in debates or conversations with other blogs.)
It’s true that blogs are capable of bringing down politicians, just like newspapers.
But financial blogs don’t have anything like the same kind of influence that
the big political blogs have, and as a result newspapers find it easy to ignore
them – that’s going to change very slowly indeed. But it will happen,
as increasing numbers of financially-literate professionals realize that there’s
a whole world of information and analysis out there on the web, and that much
of it is of objectively higher quality than the stuff they read in their daily
newspaper.
As I say, writing about finance is hard – and bloggers have a huge home-team
advantage over most mainstream media in that they don’t feel the need to spell
everything out for the sake of readers who might have no idea what a bond is.
What’s more, many of them are financial professionals themselves, and know exactly
what they’re talking about. Journalists, by contrast, tend to be arts graduates;
many of them are positively petrified every time they see a number. As a result,
as any financial news outlet will tell you, it’s really hard to find good financial
journalists.
But the biggest gap between professional journalists and bloggers hasn’t even
begun to start narrowing. It’s this: professional journalists tend to
think of their article as the end of a process of reporting, while
bloggers tend to think of their entries as the beginning of a process
of commenting.
Once a journalist’s story has been edited and published, he or she is on to
the next thing. By the end of the day, the story is lining a cat’s litter-box
somewhere. It’s over, and the journalist is hitting the phones, getting the
next scoop. There’s no equity in revisiting old pieces, especially given the
"no sooner does the ink dry than it revolts me" syndrome – something
coined by Jesse Eisinger, paraphrasing Samuel Beckett.
A blog, by contrast, is nothing without reactions – from commenters,
from other blogs, even, occasionally, from the mainstream media. Professional
journalists simply don’t view their own work in the light of how it’s received
by others in the way that bloggers do. They therefore have little interest in
using web technology to artificially extend the natural life of any given story.
I am not a columnist. A columnist’s entries must be self-contained, while blog
entries can be much more open-ended. Yesterday, I wrote something about marking
subprime bonds to market; most of my best points ended up getting made in
conversation, in the comments, rather than in the blog entry itself, which made
a silly mistake in its opening two paragraphs. The idea that you can go back
and refine and improve what you’ve already written – that is still nowhere
to be found in most professional journalism. The idea that a blogger can just
write a blank entry and say "open thread", and get hundreds or even
thousands of comments, is equally alien to anything in the mainstream media
– as is the idea that doing so is genuinely valuable and even counts as
journalism.
Yes, bloggers – including Tanta – are doing more reporting these
days. And of course it’s hard to find a newspaper or magazine which doesn’t
have blogs these days. But let’s not kid ourselves that we’re anywhere near
meeting each other in the middle.