Funding for investigative journalism

The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, a nonprofit fund launched recently, will produce a wide-range of investigative journalism created by both staff reporters and freelance writers. Some excerpts and my commentary below.

As the newspaper industry continues to contract, one of the most commonly voiced fears is that serious investigative journalism will be among the victims. It is high cost and low quantity, however high quality. Yet in the financial recession it is important to promote investigative journalism. As a citizen I want to know the specifics of why particular companies have failed. For example I want someone to compare the increases in executive remuneration as a ratio of company performance (eg. revenues), across all companies over, say, 5 years. And investigative journalists are qualified to not only do this, but also to maintain an appropriate level of professional behavior, and not turn it into a witch hunt for headlines.

The HuffFund will attempt to change this. It will also provide new opportunities for seasoned journalists who have been laid off or forced into early retirement. Picture a large pool of reporters -- some on staff, and many freelancers -- proposing stories and also receiving assignments from Investigative Fund editors.

I presume the editors are those who pay the fund? hmmmmm........ Even though it has Jay Rosen as a partner, I'm not sure if this points the way to the future of investigative journalism. It may turn into tokenism. But still I've emailed them my idea - see what happens.....

why advertising is failing on the internet

Recent attempts to promote an online survey via advertising on media websites have not generated the hits I had anticipated. It was solely promoted online. From that experience I'm inclined to agree with Prof. Eric Clemons, who writes "The problem is not the medium, the problem is the message, and the fact that it is not trusted, not wanted, and not needed." Well ummm, I'm not sure that applies to the great survey I've been trying to promote.... but perhaps there needs to be a return to advertising as an art form, relationship building via conversations, or some other approach. It's not about transplanting a normal ad into the digital realm.

More here: Why advertising is failing on the internet

But having said that, isn't the ad below just... swell? And like, girls need to know that all boys seek out girls who wear Seventeen lipstick....

what I am missing in iTunes

the bass knob..... the song I'm listening to needs more bass.....

netbooks hype

I find the hype about netbooks mystifying when the Acer tablet has all such features (touch screen, swivel screen, grunt, tiny-ish size etc) and was around 9 years ago..... and I'm currently dusting mine off to compare it with the new netbooks...

looking for positives in the global financial crisis

one positive is that it will hasten change. Out of drives for efficiency allegedly comes innovation.

Take this comment:

When reality is labeled unthinkable, it creates a kind of sickness in an industry. Leadership becomes faith-based, while employees who have the temerity to suggest that what seems to be happening is in fact happening are herded into Innovation Departments, where they can be ignored en masse.
http://www.shirky.com/weblog/2009/03/newspapers-and-thinking-the-unthinkable/

Many industry behemoths are now having to face their reality because the retraction in consumer spend is highlighting those companies with old business models that need to change but so far have dragged their feet.

it's the weekend!

thought of the day while I'm baking a pie for dinner

I think the 'global financial crisis' spells the end of capitalism, just as a few years ago we saw the so-called end of communism.

according to last.fm I've listened to this song 107 times in the last 6 months and watching this YouTube I can now see why:

reading Don Walker

From the legendary songwriter of Cold Chisel...

This extraordinary memoir begins with Don Walker’s early life in rural Australia and goes up to the late ’80s. In mesmerising prose, Don Walker writes of growing up in northern New South Wales, gigging in St. Kilda, hitchhiking through rural Australia, playing for the Hells Angels in Broadford, Victoria, and travelling through Paris, Russia and Central Europe.

Walker evokes childhood and youth, wild times in the ’70s, life on the road and in Kings Cross, music-making and much more. Shots is a stunningly original book, a set of word pictures – “shots” – that conjure up the lowlife and backroads of Australia.

Don Walker is one of Australia’s leading songwriters – first with Cold Chisel and now as a solo performer and with Tex, Don & Charlie. This is his first book.

Academia: keeping the bustards honest?

With the demise of the Democrats in Australia, and the landscape of changes in journalism, I'm pondering a proposal by Marty Lobel and Joseph Goldstein of the Mayer Brown law firm in New York. They propose a new way to prevent future financial meltdowns and suggest a team of academic experts could survey the financial field and warn government of impending problems before they happen.

It can be taken as a given that the best and brightest are in academia (myself excluded), and perhaps that academia attracts experts who are more prepared to take the high moral ground, or are what Lobel-Goldstein charmingly refer to as 'idealistic'. Financial reward is not necessarily their primary career motivation. In my initial reaction, at issue here is the independence of academia.

Academia would probably be more 'independent' than say a credit rating agency (who are paid by the corporates for their reviews, and the financial 'meltdown' possibly exposed their inadequacies in the prediction of financial distress) ; or a private audit/insolvency firm (who always approach such projects as "which of the interested parties do we have relations with and need to (a) get onside with and/or (b) get further work from). The government or journalists often get it right, but are also operating in difficult circumstances. The use of academia could be a new prong in the attack on corporate fraud, financial distress, seniors losing their pensions and workers losing their jobs.

Such a role doesn't belong in the private sector. In a former life with a corporate I was tasked with setting up a model that could identify listed equities that were 'vulnerable' (a polite way of saying 'high risk' or 'near financial distress'). This model used variants from both media, company reports, credit reports and 'word of mouth' - basically anything. The aim was to alert the company the model identified that if someone like me (ie not too bright) could spot it, so could financial analysts. And then my employer would get work going into the company (on behalf of creditors or the company) and sussing it all out. But then I had to move onto other projects and the model became a maintenance and monitoring function. But at the time I thought it would be far better if such a role were handled by academics who weren't interested in getting $$ work out of it and would have more time (and mathematical nouse) to develop it. Academics could also get their thrills working through the complex layers of financials and press that 'vulnerable' companies throw up to mask their true positions.

But on the other hand, academia in Australia has been privatised to the point that the work of academics is sometimes sponsored by the corporate world.... and hence the potential opening for some risk to the independence of academics.

But I still reckon they're the best of a bad bunch and definitely believe there is a role for academics in the monitoring of corporate risk. Only issue then is, if they identify it, what happens next? Would it go to ASIC? If so, should such a 'financial investigations cooperative research centre' of academics by federally funded via ASIC for such a proposal?

Note: I found the Lobel-Goldstein idea while looking at another idea on the excellent blog of John Mecklin. That idea concerned data mining by journalists - and data mining could be used by mathematician academics, actuaries, accountants, economics etc to identify financial distress and risk.