Writing & Blogging
Keeping up a regular blogging schedule is a tough nut to crack, because it takes an inordinate amount of time to put a series of disconnected thoughts together in a tangible and articulate manner. I have realized that I am far from articulate. So I practice often.
Alisa Miller’s entry in Seth Godin’s new eBook caught my attention (pg 34). In the entry, and a TED presentation, she talks about the abysmal state of global news coverage by the US press corps. Anybody who’s ever been subjected to around-the-clock styled American news programs can nod at the following.
Too often, American commercial news is myopic and inwardly focused.
This leads to a severe lack of global news. And increasingly, a shortage of “enterprise journalism” – journalistic depth built over time through original sources – that provides the context and enables thoughtful response.
Too often, the news sticks to crime, disasters, infotainment, and horse-race politics. Many important topics such as education, race and ethnicity, science, environment, and women and children’s issues are often less than 5% of all news combined.
Much of widely-seen online news isn’t better – it’s often just re-circulates the same stories.
The result: much of our news can’t be called “knowledge media” – content that builds insight about our world.
Things happen all the time, everywhere. What gets made news, and what doesn’t, more often or not depends on where the news take place, and whether the happenstance in question belonged to one of the above-mentioned items deemed headline-worthy. When we think about it, it’s really not at all unlike an abundance of trees falling in a remote forest. Trees fall all the time, but only those that fall at the right time, at the right place, witnessed by the right bystander that deem it important enough, will have their fate made known to the world.
As indicated by Miller, Americans are becoming more, not less curious about what’s going on around the world, aove and beyond what the cable networks are able to deliver. It is evident, because British media outlets that do a much better job with their foreign correspondents are eating into the audience pie. BBC and Guardian, not to mention the revered Economist, all command respect and eyeballs of those across the Atlantic. But with cost-cuts and and ensuing shutting downs of foreign bureaus, especially for on-air networks in the US, we hardly get a glimpse of the outside world beside bombings and disasters. That job has been relegated to public broadcast outlets such as PBS, NPR, and new private outfits the likes of Current and GlobalPost. Read more...
Welcome Gen-X readers, and thank you for visiting my blog. I write about investing, macro-economics, society, culture, career, and any other ideas and thoughts I have from my own experiences. Some samples are available here. If you enjoy my posts, then please consider subscribing to the RSS feed and spread the word, I would love to hear from you!
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More on the Recession
- What are high profile economists saying about 2009? Hear from Roubini, Taleb, Faber, Rogers, Schiff, Coxe, and more. Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the gloomiest of them all?
- For Gen X and Ys, the recession presents a myriad of opportunities in housing and investment. They are there, you just gonna look for them, and be very optimistic. Believe it or not, the recession has perks
- What the recession and the past can and can not teach us. When the paradigm changes, one must re-adjust. So perhaps looking back on history is not a great thing. One way of dealing with a broken economy: Ignore history
On investment
Some investment ideas Read more...
It’s been a month since the Investoralist officially kicked off, and I thought I’d briefly pause and write about what I’ve learned so far. Granted, a month is barely a blip, and some of the musings may seem pretty amateur to bloggers that have been labouring in this medium for years. But hey, this is the Internet, everyone gets their piece. And there’s hardly anything that I can do to prevent you from clicking away. So off I go.
The need to provide value. Before I enrolled in politics – that was my choice for graduate studies, I was interested in the Middle East. To prove it, I went traveling in the region and ended up living in Egypt for three months. I took Arabic classes. Then I went to grad school, and realized that everyone was interested in the Middle East, and everyone has seen the sufferings of the Palestinians, first-hand. I then promptly decided that I was no longer interested in the Middle East, since whatever problems it may have had, it was not for a lack of concerned political science students. And if all these smart, motivated, and outraged graduates of political science studies around the world have yet to find a solution to the problem – other than becoming bitter and indignant and depressed, I had little to offer. At least not through the same path. Or not at all.
So now I find myself blogging about investing, which is a subject that’s pretty vast and covered by a lot of people. The same issues are frequently debated up and down the journalistic and blogsophere chain. Some opinions are fruits born from careful examinations of arguments and data, some agenda-driven, some are pure drivel and derivatives. The issue of adding value to the discussion is never far from my mind when I write.
The need to be interesting. I’m not sure if the importance of being interesting should take a back-seat to providing value. God knows that we are subjected to enough dull and dreary readings. I can barely work up the will to look at my tax re-assessment from 2007 and call the government to see why they are demanding $64.36. Read more...
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