Felix Salmon (the best finance blogger on Earth):
[...] 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 [= the finance bloggers] 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. [...]
[*] Exactly. I know that for a fact from observing all the mainstream media journalists I have interacted with.
