Posts Tagged ‘Mother Jones’

Why alt media beat the MSM to the crisis

Much belatedly, here’s a link to the piece I did for Columbia Journalism Review’s The Audit business site — my take on why independent news organizations tackled the story of the mortgage crisis as it was brewing while mainstream business coverage lagged. My 2006 story for Mother Jones magazine on subprime foreclosures in Cleveland is one of several examples I cite.

I’ll get right to the answers:

  • [W]e looked for the real-world impacts of business practices. Financial journalists tend to focus on the internal benefits (to investors and bankers) of economic activity, without accounting for external social costs. We indies saw benefits and costs as inextricably linked. We could see clearly that it was a zero-sum game, and the gap between winners and losers was growing unconscionably wide. That chasm turned out to be a critical weakness in the financial system….
  • [I]ndies were also reporting out in the real world, in my case thanks to a magazine [Mother Jones] that values and invests in place-based reporting.
  • I was free (and predisposed) to question authority, not to mention the basic business practices of large financial institutions.

Sunday, October 11th, 2009 | Tags: , ,
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