by Calculated Risk on 12/11/2008 07:36:00 PM

From NYU journalism professor Alyssa Katz writing in the Columbia Journalism Review: An Irresistably Readable Mortgage Critic

Last week, journalism lost its most incisive, stubbornly accurate, and unfailing hilarious chronicler of the failings of the mortgage industry with the death of Doris Dungey of ovarian cancer, at age forty-seven.
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Thousands of devoted readers knew her as “Tanta,” the blogger who made up one half of Calculated Risk ... Those readers included a number of journalists, and I’d like to add my own voice to those who have celebrated her role.
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Following her first and almost fatal bout of cancer, in 2006 Dungey became something else – a journalist. As she recovered at home in Maryland, she had been watching from the sidelines as her industry descended into insanity and almost every business reporter in the nation went along for the ride. ... Tanta stepped up to the formidable task [of trying] to make sense of an increasingly senseless mortgage marketplace. ... She put to work not only her armament of knowledge from the cubicle maze but also a command of language that allowed her to dissect the obfuscations of mortgage lenders and explain what they were really up to. She was not just the most reliable chronicler of the workings of the mortgage industry; she was, I believe, one of the most irresistibly readable voices in the blogosphere, on any topic.

Read more about Tanta here: Tanta: In Memoriam