Banks, Bloggers and Journalists' Balls.

One of the things that worried me about The Crunch was the fairly mealy mouthed coverage mainstream media gave of bank silliness in the years leading up to it. I'm no economist, but you know that giving "self certification" and "125%" mortgages to people is the top end of a bubble - as it was the last time in the late 1980's. Likewise the huge lendings in the old Soviet republics looked exactly like the Asian crisis in the 1990's and the Latin American one beforehand.

This stuff was not hard to see coming. Timing was a bit harder (I thought end 2006, turns out it was mid 2007 though the real info only came out mid 2008 - which is odd as many leading indicators were flashing red)

But, I have been following the Sir Allen Stanford story for a few months (He's a Madoff--Lite - a mere $8bn alleged fraud) simply because of the cricket connection - and its worth noting that the blogosphere had picked it up on him some time ago, whereas the MSM stayed shtum.

Now I understand the reasons - not having evidence, allegations can get you sued etc etc - but the point remains that the MSM was visibly behind the pace here.

As it was on The Crunch - and I am told by quite a few little birds that there, issues had less to do with journalistic integrity and a lot more to do with a combo of papers not wanting to lose Ad revenue, and frankly being seduced by the bankers's stories (and the bankers ....).

The key point is this - the MSM largely failed in its coverage of the biggest story of the decade, and is provably failing still. The blogosphere, with all its failings, is getting the story out.

If the point of "serious" news is to get to the truth, it didn't do - so its effectively, systemically broken one could argue.

So, I'm beginning to think that the malaise of Print Journalism is deeper than just the short term cr*p economics of the industry - its a deeper malaise, in that it is simply not doing its job. Thats why people are walking away.

So the solution may not be the issue around classifieds, or dis-aggregation of lifestyle sections, or whatever - it may simply be to have the balls to tell the people the truth.

Update - as Sarah Lacy notes, the trick to find out what is going on is just to follow what the smart players are doing - and then tell us.

Update - really good comment from Terence Eden pointing out that the blogosphere has at any point such a wide range of opinions that a few people are bound to be right - so how do you sort out the wheat from the other chaff? I suppose it comes down to blogs you think you can trust. In the Stanford case it was Alex Dalmady who picked it up originally, I must admit I didn't see it until a friend told me about while I was at TED, but said friend knows his stuff in this game.