This month, CJR presents “Required Skimming,” a daily miniguide to our staffers’ beats and obsessions, ranging from finance to food. If we overlooked any of your must-read destinations, please tell us in the comments.
• Alexis Madrigal: A senior editor at The Atlantic who writes with playful enthusiasm about innovation, entrepreneurship, and creative uses of technology.
• Atlas Obscura: Brainchild of one of the obnoxiously fabulous Foer Brothers, this site lives up to its billing as a “catalogue of the singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange out-of-the-way places.”
• @brainpicker: A bit thick on inspirational quotes, but Maria Popova also delivers the steadiest stream of “interestingness” anywhere on Twitter.
• Ideas Market: Chris Shea’s excellent handbook of research being done will refashion your head into the shape of a satisfied egg.
• @kottke: One of the longest and best continuously running blogs on the Internet; a source for uplift and delight that rarely disappoints.
• Marginal Revolution: A showcase of the wide-ranging, urbane tastes of economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, it’s the go-to blog for polymaths and aspiring James Bond villains.
• @wired: Still the hitchhikers’ guide to the future.
I brought up Factiva and searched major news and business publications in the U.S., to get an idea of just how much Zandi appears in the press. So far this year, he’s appeared 446 times to date, roughly 1.8 times a day. In the last week alone, he shows up about twenty-five times in USA Today (twice), Reuters, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal (twice), Marketwatch, Dow Jones Newswires, Agence France Presse.
Reuters called on Zandi to speculate on what Obama might include in his jobs plan. He’s the first pundit quoted in the piece, and you can see why:
“I think he’s going to probably try to thread the needle — have a few things that are very practical and necessary for the economy over the next 12-18 months,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics and a former adviser to 2008 Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
“Anything he says, it’s going to be hard for him to get a lot of people really excited about.”
Err… maybe not.
No one came close to quoting Zandi as Bloomberg, which has talked to him six times over the last week, including three times for three different stories by three different reporters today alone. He’s showed up there six times in the last week, including this TV hit:
Little-known fact: Mark Zandi has his own Bloomberg terminal code. (I’m kidding—I think).
If Zandi isn’t the Most Interviewed Man in the Business Press by a wide margin, he’s up there in the top two or three. I get roughly seventy Zandi hits on Bloomberg’s site so far this year. On Factiva, he shows up sixty-seven times in the AP, thirty-three times in the Post, thirty-two times in USA Today, and twenty-six times in The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal is relatively Zandi-deprived, with just fifteen mentions.
It’s good for him and for Moody’s, who get all that free advertising and credibility.
It’s not so good for readers, who deserve to hear a broader range of voices.
Sang Ngo