I'm referring to Krugman's Nobel. I recognize that he has done important, possibly Nobel-quality work. But so have many others who haven't won. The question is whether it's really his work for the NYT that propelled him past the competition. Tyler Cowen suggests that was a factor in his winning the price for himself rather than sharing it with others who have done similar work.
So I guess I'll keep blogging and see what happens.
There's a new blog by a couple of entering college freshmen. It's already making more sense than some law professor blogs I could (but won't) name. The early going brings us posts about the pointlessness of happiness research and why postal services (among other government functions) should be privatized. I'm hooked.
The Glom’s junior scholar workshop kicks off with Brian Broughman’s The Role of Independent Directors in VC-Backed Firms and comments by Gordon Smith, Bill Carney, Tom Ulen and me, organized by my colleague Christine Hurt.
It’s a great opportunity for scholars to get feedback. For readers, it offers in-depth analyses and discussion of an important issue – in this case, governance of VC-backed firms. Check it out.
Tyler Cowen quotes Matthew Yglesias:
The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it's primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT.
And Tyler responds:
[T]he broader logic of the internet is toward disaggregation of content -- the fact that newspapers cover such a wide array of content has to do with the economics of printing and distributing bundles of newsprint. In the future, fashion ads probably won't be able to cross-subsidize any bureaux anywhere.
I agree, but have wondered about the outcome of the competition between newspapers and blogs and other internet content:
Consumers may continue to prefer that their news be delivered in paper or other physical form even as web access becomes ubiquitous. Physical delivery requires capital investments that are beyond amateurs’ reach. Even if the web replaces physical delivery, consumers may prefer to forego search costs and, in effect, buy from the professional media the service of choosing, aggregating, and vouching for all of the types of information consumers want, including entertainment reviews, classified pages and other advertising information, sports scores, recipes, bridge advice, and comics. The professional media can shape the demand for this bundled product through advertising, promotion, and other mechanisms for creating goodwill. They can use their most popular features to promote other parts of the bundle. The professional media’s resources enable them to invest in popular writers and branded syndicated features.
This matters on whether competition from the wide spectrum of blogs ultimately can offset the media bias I discuss in my article. (Tyler points to real estate advertising as distorting coverage of the housing bubble. I discuss other, more endemic, sources of media bias). I suggest:
Consumers . . . may be willing to continue to buy biased reporting because they get offsetting benefits from the overall product. Even if consumers supplement their reading with blogs, they may continue to be influenced by professional reporting.
So whether aggregation beats disaggregation may help determine who wins the competition between big and new media.
The title of this post is, of course, The Onion’s tagline, and I won’t argue with this. It’s certainly not the LA Times, by the evidence of the Kozinski so-called scandal.
The LAT played into the “litigation strategy” of a litigious Beverly Hills lawyer, who accessed Judge Kozinski’s computer’s pile of humorous off-color material. Gordon Crovitz writes today in the WSJ that the case “showed how easily privacy is breached online, how mainstream media botch a story, and how bloggers can redeem journalism by reporting facts.”
Specifically, Kozinski’s wife used a blog to publish a defense of the judge. As Crovitz says, within a week “citizen-journalist bloggers establish[ed] this as a nonscandal.” (Not least among these blogs was Overlawyered.)
This “redemption” of the mainstream media by bloggers might surprise some who still think of bloggers as an excrescence on the “legitimate” press. But this is part of the important work blogs do. I’ve written in my article on blogging that blogs' accuracy-increasing function “is comparable to the market efficiency function of securities analysts. . . Blogs ironically may actually increase the value of at least some conventional media sources.” In other words, sources like the LAT have value because lots of people read them, including bloggers, who correct them.
Of course there may come a point at which a particular msm source becomes so inaccurate that nobody will bother to read it in the first place, including bloggers. That may happen to the LAT, but hopefully not to The Onion.
Yes, it's that time of year again, over at the Glom. It's a great opportunity both for scholars and readers. Check it out.
Although the WSJ has been, in my view, a leader in integrating blogs with mainstream, the stodgy old NYT has taken a leap forward by more bringing on a law professor to do a regular blogging stint. They’ve got Steven Davidoff, who’s done a great job nailing mergers and acquisitions for Caron’s blog network, and now moves his act to Broadway, so to speak.
Note that this is one of the outcomes of the competition between the mainstream media and what I called “publicly engaged academic posts” that I predicted in my Public Face of Scholarship:
If PEAPs and other blogs can effectively compete with the professional media, the professional outlets have an incentive to respond by changing their content. . . . The professional media might hire journalists from outside the “guild,” including amateur journalists.
See ya after the holiday.
Over at Conglomerate, I talk about angels -- that is, Darian Ibrahim's article on angel investors (what did you think I meant?).
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