If journalism is the “First draft of history”, as Phillip Graham of the Washington Post is credited with saying, what happens when they get it completely wrong? How does that first draft get crumbled up in the minds of the readers and who gets to write the second draft? I’ve been chatting with a lot of people in an attempt to understand how our opinions of the ongoing economic crisis has gone down as we hear different stories over time. The answer, I have come to believe, is the second draft is written by the readers and consumers of journalism. If true, this may give us some insight as to the future of journalism, interaction, and how a whole culture arrives at “The Truth”™.
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Category Archives: Money
Economics and commerce, all built from scratch.
Wanna Bet?
Suppose something happens in your neighborhood, such as a new family moving in next door or a new business opening up in the vacant restaurant space on the strip. You look them over and become convinced that there is no way that they are going to make it – they can’t possibly cover that huge new mortgage or the business seems likely to fail. There are three things you can do, economically, to take advantage of your assessment – shake your head and wonder who loaned them the money, make a bet with a friend that they don’t make it to the end of the year, or you can go around with a notebook betting everyone in the neighborhood and keeping track of the money put down and the odds that you were given for each bet like any good bookie.
Restaurant Biz
Many people sit in a restaurant and dream of having one of their own. On the surface, it seems so simple – have a good idea, be a good host, show people a good time and it must practically run itself, right? While the do-it-yourself ethic may be a great idea for many things in life, a restaurant just isn’t one of them because, put simply, it’s not something you do for yourself but for your customers. Yet there’s nothing to get the ideas flowing like an empty space decked out in a stainless steel kitchen, marble bar, and wooden tables to get the imagination going.
Such a place just opened up, again, in my neighborhood. Any takers?
Fried in Greece
Another big credit crunch is brewing, this one starting in Greece. It may not be obvious how and why this has the potential to affect us across the Atlantic, but it does. In many ways, this is just a mirror of the Goldman grilling in the US House – a story of cavalier disregard for reality unraveling as the people nominally in charge of things try to get a grip on what is actually going on. How this one is handled will resonate for at least the next few months as the developed world struggles to get a handle on what’s really happening and what they can do about it.
I Report, You Decide
There’s been a lot of strange economic news lately. All of it, sadly, was true. Here are a few stories that I would prefer to see.
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 