Last word on the topic of the week

abnormalreturns
February 12th, 2006

The topic of the week has been the analysis of a David Weidner piece on financial bloggers, us included over at Marketwatch.com. We touched on the topic a couple of times, here and here.

Thankfully Gal Beckerman in The Audit over at CJR Daily gives the Weidner piece a thorough going over. Beckerman takes apart Weidner’s defensiveness on the topic of financial bloggers. In short,

If you don’t want to read blogs, don’t. But a lot of people, we imagine, neither find them boring, nor share Weidner’s opinion that blogs make “the stock tables in the back of the newspaper read like poetry.”

The beauty of the Internet and the attraction of blogs in particular, is that it allows a wide variety of players to put their views into the public domain. Beckerman notes that Weidner is not particularly happy about this ongoing trend,

Clearly, Weidner wants exclusive access to the Internet. But if the Internet is to be dominated by the mainstream media, what is the use of having a World Wide Web? One purpose, we’d suggest, is to find information that helps us to decipher and contextualize the business media’s notoriously cryptic writing and reporting.

We recommend any one interested in this mini-debate read the entire Beckerman piece as the last and best word on the topic.