ghariton wrote:
Yes. You did say "most". For an example of someone I usually find quite worthwhile, let me point to Larry Swedroe, who I read at ETF.com. There is usually some meat on his columns. I may not agree with all he writes, but at least it gets me thinking. I point to Swedroe, but there are plenty of others. For example, I usually read anything by Cliff Asness.
Unfortunately, columnists in Canada all seem to be in a competition to make finance as simple as possible, and even simpler. There's not a single one that I follow regularly any more.
George
To be fair George the people you highlight - as AltaRed pointed out about another writer - are industry professionals. I have learned that many smart people in the industry are not good writers. But it's not fair to compare content of full time journalists with those of industry professionals. We get to write what we want and it only gets published if the media outlets are interested in running it.
I struggle to write an original piece once monthly. And I don't like recycled themes (though I will if a new angle emerges). Full time journalists of daily papers simply can't go too deep because they are writing a few articles weekly. And each article is shorter than it used to be so it often takes more time to keep it shorter. I spoke to a journalist the other day for 25 minutes. She will take one or two sentences - max - from our conversation. And she's doing a few interviews for this one story.
So I think we need to recognize what journalists' job is - which is to aggregate their research and the opinions of experts in the field and communicate it in terms that a broad cross section of readers can digest. That is a tough job. And Rob Carrick does a really good job of it (even when he's not quoting yours truly
).
But it's also not fair to criticize Carrick because of that "how to find $10k" link because that's from a regular feature that Carrick has been doing for a while. The whole purpose is to aggregate interesting links and stories from around the web. That's completely different from his 'day job' of writing his regular Globe columns.