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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.

How did it come to this?

1. First and foremost, the race to top of the ratings league, and the focus on profitability have most likely doomed the industry to short-sightedness.  Should one fixate on ratings numbers and profit to the exclusion of any long-term vision, then the quality of stories will most likely keep falling to meet the lowest denominator. Until one day, 75% of your programming is spent chasing after Anna Nichole Smith, MJ, the balloon boy or Jon and Kate+8.  When that happens, you have essentially stooped so low as to talk to the entire American demographic as though they are stay-at-home moms.

2. Reporters should be story tellers, not type-writer monkeys that intercept wire stories and churn them out through templates. Yet most outfits lack the will and ambition to unveil global stories with the right kind of background and context to render them relevant.  I don’t mean one has do a song and dance number in order to “entertain” and bribe its audience members into attention.  But there are ways to of framing an issue, of presenting a coherent (and more importantly, accurate) chain of events to make us listen.

It may be more costly and time-consuming to produce, but credibility is gained through hard work behind honest reporting that happens day after day. And quality definitely trumps quantity, right? Instead of crappy live reporting 7 hours a day, how about quality, educational reporting, for just 1 hour a day?  If it’s that good, I promise, I will watch it 7 times.

On a side note, CNN, you are going overboard with your Twitter and Facebook shenanigans.  For someone with your kind of newsroom reach and brain power, why must you have Jim Clancy read out incoherent 140 char tweets?  We know what you are trying to do, and the game is lame.

3.  For the better part of the last decade, political culture in America has become more inward-looking.  Unilateral political actions has triumphed over multi-lateralism, and its influence has clearly permeated the culture fabric, making its impact on the general public felt.  By blithely shunning its allies and pulling away from global governing bodies, the unspoken message seemed to be: there’s no need to get too involved, or interested, in the rest of the world.

Similarly, globalization has sometimes been mistakenly painted as Americanization – every city’s getting its own Starbucks and McDonald’s.  The popularity of American culture and language has for decades perpetuated the very illusion.  As global trade continues, the exchange of culture has more or less been a one way street – much on its way out, and very little coming in.

So now big media is in trouble, and everyone’s hyperventilating. There’s a lot of talk about going local, even hyperlocal, whatever that means.  But my question is, why not go out, go global, go hyperglobal?  After all, there really is such a lot of world to see.

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!

Here are some places to start that will give you a taste of this blog:

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

• The market is far from inefficient, the sooner you accept this, the better you can sleep at night.  Believe this, and you’ll sleep better at night
• Whole-picture macro-trends driven investing is not easy, if you don’t believe the difficulties of it, just read this.  Or maybe not, because you might stop investing altogether. Are you seeing the whole picture when it comes to investing?
• Has the financial crisis changed fundamental rules of investing going forward? Read about why investors and consumers are the only ones that can push businesses into good behaviour. Old rules out, new rules in: What investors should demand going forward?

Some investment ideas

• The food crisis ruled the news last year, now it’s forgotten.  Will the food crisis come back, and when it does, are we prepared? And more importantly, can we benefit from this?  What the forgotten food crisis means for your investment
• The housing bubble took place with no demographic support, maybe that’s why we’re in this hole right now.  Love it or hate it, demographics matters for an investor (I)
• What demographics are telling investors to focus on in the future. Hint: needs will trump wants. Hint: where do most people in the world live and what do they absolutely need? Love it or hate it, demographics matters for an investor (II)

Some comic relief, cuz God knows we need every bit of laugh we can get

• Places that are doing worse than your average recession-ridden economies.  That is, unless you live in Iceland, Germany, Japan, or Ireland.  Then I’m truly sorry.  Who’s worse off than you?
• The curious case of Berlin and how it’s able to avoid the recession. I explain my findings of the city, along with pictures from 2008.  Who is too poor to afford a recession?
• Thoughts on European immigration and the welfare system, and a piece on Japan and its very broken society . Those are not as funny but hopefully you find some solace in other people’s equally unsolveable problems?  When pragmatism trumps ideology and Japan and its broken social contract.
  
• On my life in the land of cows and windmills, on baking my own birthday cake and endless air kisses.  The year of living Dutch

Do you like what you’ve read and want to keep up?  Please consider subscribing to the RSS feed and drop a line, I would love to hear from you!

picture source: jimmycohrssen

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.

The issue with investment and perhaps any kind of personal finance writing is that the subject itself is not something most people naturally gravitate towards.  It’s not escapist, because reading about something that tells you how to sort out your money is usually pretty serious stuff, and you need to pay attention.  Not like reading snarky news on some dumb celebrity’s impending divorce or rehab mishaps when you are waiting for your dentist appointment or sitting in the salon chair. Because at the end of those, you roll your eyes, shake your head, slap the stuff down and get on with your life, feeling just that slightly happier and relived.  But what you read on personal finance probably just makes you more jittery and agitated.  Most writers on those subject are out to teach you something that you are doing wrong.  And there’s always a call to action at the end that more often than not leaves you feeling guilty, because you know you should do it, or at least look into it.  But that to-do list just gets longer.

Investing and managing your finances is also not sexy. I’m not sure if there is anything instinctual about the subject that pulls one in, compared to say, gossip or productivity and inspirational writing.  Let’s face it, the subject itself does not have broad appeal.  But we deal with it out of necessity, and competitiveness.  Or perhaps greed.  That could be a good motivating factor.  Except most advice served in this subject tend to be conservative and very sensible.  Too sensible to rouse that Donald Trump I-will-make-you-rich-if-only intensity.  Personal finance bloggers are a prudent bunch, dishing out advice from frugal living to high-yield saving accounts, to carefully monitoring the market and discussing amongst themselves whether there is potential for an upturn.  It does not promise a quantum jump in the quality of your life in one sweeping gesture of dramatic change.

So what makes, interesting?

Writing what I want to write. I had no idea what the personal finance blog landscape was like a month ago. I had no idea what other people wrote, and I had no idea what people liked to read.  A few days into writing, I figured it was a good idea to find out.  I did, and now I know.

So now I can write with the peace of mind that everyone does it their own way.  Sure, there are plenty of people out there talking about SEO, writing catchy titles, baiting existing bloggers, stirring up controversy.  I’ve seen what HuffPo resorts to in order to get more pageviews, I don’t think I can do that.  At least not before moneymaking become a concern and Google AdSense goes up.  But for now, I really just want to focus on what I want to write.

I know what I cannot write.  I am not fit to give out frugality tips, nor tell someone how to organize their bank accounts when I can’t do the same, nor graph my way to stock-picking stardom.  So I will write what I find interesting – the market, and how it absorbs ebbs and flows of political and economic decisions of past and present, how it translates and amplifies our various rational and irrational expectations of the present and future.  It is as close to an oracle as it can be: it reflects the fundamental health of the economy, but it also deceptive in its momentary indulgence of collective greed or fear.  In good times, it’s mellow and eternally optimistic. But in times like now, it is a wild beast unleashed.

To me, that is dynamism worth learning and writing about.  Because learning about the market is akin to learning about the world.  For there is not one force that dominates, but an intersection of competing and antagonistic ideas that battle against each other on a daily basis.  In that sense, the topics that I can bring up in an investment-focused blog is endless.

Write less and talk more. It’s no fun talking to myself.  It’s even less fun talking to myself in verbose and stuffy sentences.  This is an unfortunate side-effect of spending time in graduate school writing essays that nobody reads.  I will work on simpler delivery.

I left graduate school last year.  There were various reasons.  But one that bothered me the most was the tendency for everyone to talk past each other.  And everybody talked too much, the least of all me.  The thing with school is that you pay to voice your opinions, and nobody can shut you up and say, “Hey, that was completely ridiculous and irrelevant and please just shut it because we can’t take it anymore.”  It’s the same idea as saying “There are no stupid questions.”  Actually, there are, lots of them.

So what ultimately happens is that everyone sits around for hours on end, pontificating on theories developed by long-dead Europeans that would probably turn in their graves if they so much as overhear some of our self-involved interpretations of their life’s work.  It gradually dawned on me, on how the whole field of social science is like setting up the scene to accommodate breakthroughs, not unlike waiting for the Second Coming.  The rest of the time, people mull around to recycle, re-test, quote and mis-quote, agree or disagree with mountains of academic journals before them.  To me, there just wasn’t enough value generated to justify the huge expense in time.

Back to blogging.  I hear time and again that community and dialogue is the most important aspect of blogging.  I am looking forward to that.  There is no shortage of good discussion in the blogosphere, and I’m as eager as the next blogger for some heated and engaging conversations.  I also like to be disagreed with.  So bring it on!

picture source: *eduardovieira