by Calculated Risk on 9/28/2018 10:07:00 AM

CR Note: Gone hiking! I will return on Thursday, Oct 4th. Another post on Tanta!

Every finance and economics blogger owes Tanta a debt of gratitude. Before Tanta wrote the following essay, newspapers would "borrow" ideas and subjects from bloggers, and never mention the source. In March 2007 - with a powerful essay - she changed the way the main street media treated bloggers.

 In the week following publication of this piece, Tanta or myself were mentioned in just about every major newspaper in the US!

Sadly the media has trouble distinguishing between informed commentary and nonsense (like Zero Right) ... but at least bloggers now get mentioned.

From March 2007: Media Inquiries Policy

Calculated Risk is a hobby blog, created and maintained by a retired executive, with occasional assistance from a former bank officer and mortgage lending specialist who is currently on extended medical leave. Both of these people get endless questions, answers, hat tips, links, analysis, and overall inspiration from a very diverse group of commenters, regulars and occasional de-lurkers, all of whom are beloved except some of them.

CR regularly gets emails and comments from paid reporters who wish to know if CR or Tanta would like to be interviewed, or would simply like to answer one or several questions that the reporter has about economic or housing or mortgage issues. Because, so far, the answer has always been something on the order of “no,” we would like to explain to you why this is the case.
...
Dear reporters, we quote your stuff periodically, giving credit both to the reporter and the publication, under fair use terms. We have no objection to your returning the favor. If you have an editor who will not allow that, and you think that the problem can be solved by getting one of us to drop our online personas, give you our real names, and say the same thing to you over the phone, so that you can get your editor to accept it as something other than just blogging, which everybody knows is untrustworthy ranting by anonymous nuts, you are making a faulty assumption about the relationship among us, our birthdays, and yesterday. Neither CR nor Tanta wishes to play into a set of assumptions that render what we say on the blog as unworthy of coverage by the Big Media, but what we might say on the phone to Intrepid Reporter as good dirt and straight skinny.