Blogonomics: The Gulf Between Bloggers and Professional Journalists

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 perfected. 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.