Reuters’ Counterparties: We Have a Better Press Corps Weblogging

Riding down 15th St., on the way to Caribou Coffee after the three hour WCEG launch event, we pass the Washington Post:

Problems with Obamacare test loyalty of Democrats…

the scrolling chyron reads.

• Not: “…require delay of the ACA’s minimum essential benefits insurance mandate”.
• Not: “…reveal that the ACA’s insurance reforms were too much too fast to be successfully implemented”.
• Not: “…suggest that nationwide RomneyCare was a riskier move in insurance reform than the alternatives of single-payer, government catastrophic back-up, or a more open system with a public option”.
• Not even: “…lead to confused political maneuvering over whether and how much of the Obamacare insurance mandates will be rolled back or delayed.

But, instead: “…test loyalty of Democrats…”

Were I writing a screenplay of my life, I might have been tempted by such a juxtaposition. “What irony!” I might have thought. “Immediately follow three hours of technocratic discussion on how we need to focus public attention and debate on what really matters for the lives of Americans with the mindless partisan point-scoring of the Washington Post!” But, in the end, I would have rejected such an option: I would have dismissed it as too cute, and as likely to break the viewer’s willing suspension of disbelief.

Plus what Caribou Coffee calls a sandwich—maple-bacon-gruyere—is, by any standard, an abomination.

But I have promised to be good over here.

So let me instead pick up on the attendance of Shane Ferro, from the Reuters Counterparties team helmed by Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy, at the WCEG launch event. And so let me direct your attention to the excellent Reuters Counterparties.

Seriously, if all I did was read Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View and Counterparties, I would be at least 75% as well informed about the flow of current financial and economic analysis as I am now. Most recently:

And it all assumes, as Ezra Klein puts it, that its target readers are eager for more information–eager to grow their vocabularies, to stretch their conceptual horizons, to read articles that they have to think about for a few minutes to properly understand.

It’s a treasure.

Does it have a sustainable long-run business model? Ah, that’s a question…

The latest from Felix:

How the NYT neglects business journalism: Brian Abelson has a fantastic post about the performance of NYT articles…. There’s a lot of information in the post, however, and a couple of other things jumped out at me, seeing as how I’m a business journalist for a wire service. The first is the almost hilarious way in which the NYT seems to go out of its way to ensure that readers do not read wire stories on the NYT site…. One way of looking at this is that the readers have spoken–and they’ve shown, quite clearly, that the NYT has made the right choice to pay Reuters and the AP for the right to run their wire stories. Another way of looking at this, however, is that the NYT systematically underutlilizes the wire stories it’s paying for. To be sure, those stories are available elsewhere on the internet: they’re not exclusive to the NYT. But readers don’t care about exclusives–even if they’re genuine exclusives, which, most of the time, they’re not. Readers just want to know what’s going on in the world–and the wires can do a very good job…. What’s more, from a business perspective, it would make sense for the NYT to put more promotional muscle behind the stories…. Given the limited space available on section fronts and in the NYT’s Twitter feeds, doing so would help to maximize pageviews and would deliver more of what the NYT’s readership is demonstrating that it wants to read….

Business-news pages are some of the most valuable on the website, in terms of the amount that the NYT ad-sales team can charge for them. (They’re so valuable, in fact, that the entire Dealbook section remains outside the NYT paywall, in an attempt to garner it as many pageviews as possible.) By promoting more business stories, even if they are (horrors!) wire stories, the NYT could make more money, and everybody wants that–including the readers, who have shown that they have more interest in such things than the NYT’s editors think that they do. What would be lost by such an approach? Very little: a few dining and metro stories might get viewed less often, if their promotional muscle started getting transferred to the business section. And maybe a few NYT egos might get a little bruised, if they discovered that their snowflakes weren’t quite as precious, to the outside world, as they liked to think, at least in comparison to the wire. But the website should be run for readers, not for journalists. And improbable as it might sound, it looks very much as though those readers would be best served if the NYT made it significantly easier to find wire stories, business stories, and–especially–business wire stories.

The latest from Ryan:

Argentina’s patriotic inflation stats | Data Dive: For a country where economists can be prosecuted for publishing independent estimates of inflation, Argentina won some unexpected praise from the IMF on Sunday. Chrstine LaGarde, the IMF’s managing director, said Argentina has made “positive progress” on its notoriously questionable economic data. Argentina’s official inflation statistics have been routinely lower than independent measures of inflation. Here’s a look…

The latest from Shane:

Shane:

Awash in fuel | Counterparties:

The average price of a gallon of gas in the US this week is $3.19, and it’s been been falling since Labor Day, when it hit $3.60. The falling price caused one research firm to up its third-quarter GDP forecast by 0.3 percentage points to 2.7%. While part of the fall in gas prices is likely a typical seasonal fluctuation coupled with the falling price of oil (WTI crude is now about $93 a barrel, compared to about $110 over the summer), Brad Plumer writes that there are other factors at work. For one, no hurricanes have hit the Gulf Coast, which means the refineries in the area have been more productive than usual this year. Today, Jason Furman, the head of the White House Council of Economic Advisors, tweeted that “monthly domestic crude oil production exceeded crude oil imports for the first time since Feb 95”.

Perhaps an even bigger factor is the increase in the production of natural gas in the US, which has led to American refiners producing a lot of diesel that gets exported. “The U.S. became a net exporter of petroleum products just two years ago and is now the largest exporter in the world”, according to CNBC. Domestic gas is just a byproduct. “Gasoline is produced in the same process but it isn’t as widely used abroad, leaving the U.S. market awash in the fuel”, writes the WSJ. The ethanol market is also affecting the price of gas. Here’s Plumer: “Earlier this year, many refineries were buying up renewable credits, known as ‘RINs’, in anticipation that the Environmental Protection Agency would tighten its rule on how much ethanol needs to be mixed in with gasoline in 2014. The price of RINs soared, which, in turn, may have driven up gasoline prices. The opposite is happening now as many observers think the EPA could weaken its ethanol targets for 2014 (a leaked draft suggested as much). Partly as a result, the price of RINs has fallen sharply since July — and with it, some analysts think, the price of gasoline…

422 words…