Despite the fact that O’Donnell laudably tried to focus the audience’s awareness onand hopefully final, Charlie Sheen trainwreck interview, courtesy of the tragic undertow that threatens to pull Sheen below for fantastic, I used to be overtaken, not through the pulling on the thread, and then the voracious audience he serves. It did not make me depressing, it crafted me angry.
In the case of celebrities, we will be a heartless country, basking in their misfortunes like nude sunbathers at Schadenfreude Seaside. The impulse is understandable, to some degree. It could possibly be grating to listen to complaints from people today who benefit from privileges that most of us can not even think about. If you should cannot muster up some compassion for Charlie Sheen, who makes alot more money for a day’s perform than the majority of us will make inside a decade’s time, I guess I can not blame you.
With all the fast tempo of events on the net and then the information and facts revolution sparked by the Online, it’s particularly painless for your solutions market to suppose it’s distinctive: repeatedly breaking new ground and doing issues that no person has ever accomplished prior to.
But you'll find other kinds of corporation which have already undergone a number of the very same radical shifts, and have just as superb a stake during the long run.
Consider healthcare, for instance.
We frequently imagine of it as being a substantial, lumbering beast, but in reality, medicine has undergone a sequence of revolutions inside past 200 a long time which have been at the least equal to individuals we see in technological innovation and details.
Significantly less understandable, but nonetheless inside the norms of human nature, will be the impulse to rubberneck, to slow down and look into the carnage of Charlie spectacle of Sheen’s unraveling, but on the blithe interviewer Sheen’s existence as we pass it inside right lane of our each day lives. To get honest, it could be challenging for individuals to discern the distinction between a run-of-the-mill focus whore, and an honest-to-goodness, circling the drain tragedy-to-be. On its individual merits, a quote like “I Am On a Drug. It is Referred to as Charlie Sheen” is sheer genius, and we can’t all be expected to consider the total measure of someone’s daily life each and every time we listen to a little something funny.
Rapidly forward to 2011 and I am looking to investigate indicates of currently being a little more business-like about my hobbies (generally songs). From the stop of January I had manned up and started off to promote my blogs. I had produced a few completely different blogs, which were contributed to by colleagues and colleagues. I promoted these pursuits because of Facebook and Twitter.
Second: the small abomination the Gang of Five on the Supream Court gave us a year or so back (Citizens Inebriated) definitely consists of a little bouncing betty of its individual that could quite properly go off inside faces of Govs Wanker, Sacitch, Krysty, and J.O. Daniels. Because this ruling prolonged the idea of “personhood” to the two firms and unions, to consider to deny them any correct to run within the legal framework that they had been organized under deprives these “persons” of your freedoms of speech, association and motion. Which implies (as soon as once again, quoting law school educated friends and family) that possibly the courts need to uphold these rights for that unions (as person “persons” as guaranteed from the Federal (and most state) constitutions, or they have to declare that these attempts at stripping or limiting union rights should utilize to serious corporations, also.
Via bank wires and PayPal emails, sent to accounts in Philadelphia, New York, the U.K., Spain, Germany, Italy, Brazil, and here in France, Worldcrunch is sending out its first payments to the men and women (mostly women so far) who select, translate, and shape the stories we are producing for our site and the sites of our partners.
It is a significant occasion for any startup when it begins to make its wares with the sweat and smarts of real people, beyond its founders and first investors. I would add that it is even more significant — in 2011 — if those people are professional journalists, getting paid for their work.
But this post is not about self-congratulation, or even necessarily optimism for the news business or the profession of journalism as a whole. One of the rationales for our decision in December to go live with our online work-in-progress/pre-beta “garage” was to be able to take the first step in seeing how we might build a team of journalists — with a range of experience, backgrounds and foreign-language skills — to make our daily (top-quality!) supply of global donuts.
In financial terms, the good news for our project is bad news for the only line of work I’ve known for the past 18 years: smart, qualified, multilingual professionals are ready to work at a rate that is indeed lower than the very modest money I was making when I began 18 years ago.
In the short/medium term, this works in our favor, allowing Worldcrunch to showcase our stuff without burning through the first bit of seed investment we have raised. Whether it is good news in the longer term is a much more complicated question that touches on what we might call the labor economics of the transformation of the news business.
I am not an economist, and have exactly 14 months of business experience…so the best point of entry I can offer is the economics of my own transformation in the news business.
Time, where I’d been a correspondent since 2001, has progressively been moving to a freelance-stringer model, and has cut staff positions every year since 2005. My turn came in May 2009. I had the possibility to continue contributing with a solid pay rate, which — if I supplemented with another string or two — could allow me to earn a living and keep calling myself a Time correspondent. And indeed, that is what I did for a while.
But all along, this project was staring down at me from the shelf, saying “now or never.” And so, on the side, I got the ball rolling on what would become Worldcrunch.
But my story is the exception that proves the rule. For starters, I have a wife with a good job (that’s grist alone for a whole other post!), and a net of security from the French social system (ditto!) that colleagues in the U.S. and elsewhere don’t necessarily enjoy. But more to the point, I had Worldcrunch, a bona fide business concept, a would-be company to build, that went beyond the sum total of the journalism I could produce with my own two feet and 10 fingers.
And so, this post contains a conspicuously paradoxical polemic: an entrepreneurial journalist taking issue with all the huffing and puffing about the “rise of the entrepreneurial journalist.”
First, though, to try to limit the amount of hyperventilating on Twitter, let it be clear that the concept that Jarvis and others champion largely reflects what is in fact a new reality for both individual journalists and the news business as a whole: We all must market our work better, we must look for creative ways to generate revenue (for ourselves, and others), we must innovate, adapt, evolve, and take the occasional calculated professional risk that all successful people do to strike forth into new territory.
My gripe is that this misses a basic reality that most journalists face, that they know right well what territory they want to conquer: It’s called journalism, y’know, like doing stories, shooting videos, covering beats. Notwithstanding the power of Twitter/Facebook/liveblogging/extreme aggregation or any combination thereof, the self-contained “piece” of journalism remains the form the vast majority of people still rely on to get informed, educated, entertained. And by far, the most likely way to get paid for your journalistic work continues to be selling the sweat of your labors to a media outlet, either by the piece or by way of a salaried position. (For the record, having a fixed job doesn’t in itself make you fat or lazy or unethical. Indeed, it remains the most efficient path to the kind of honest/investigative/experimental work we used to call enterprise journalism, a term that both pre-dates and, a priori, produces more civic value than entrepreneurial journalism.)
Some like to celebrate the cases of those who have used the tools of new technology to carve out their own space and make major career leaps, unhindered by the conventions of traditional news business economics. But these exceptions continue to prove the rule: The vast majority of wannabe, would-be, once-were full-time journos — who work hard, have ideas and talent, and are willing to adapt to new platforms and technologies — are simply sliding down into that ever widening pool of underpaid piece workers, hired-gun press releasers, content-farm sharecroppers.
What may look like the golden new age of entrepreneurial journalism for the lucky few cannot hide the dark realities of bad-old freelancing for a growing proportion of those actually delivering the goods.
The cause, we all know well: The Internet-era business model for the industry just ain’t there yet, and probably won’t be for a good while. The risk, of course, is that the new landscape being tilled with the received wisdom that “anyone can do journalism” will wind up barren of anyone who can pay the bills doing journalism, the kind where news is gathered and sense is made of events in the places where they happen. We are in serious self-fulfilling prophecy territory.
Still, I would be a fool, on a number of levels, if I spent my energy trying to preserve or bring back the old labor model. But being flat in the middle of a do-or-die startup, I also have no choice but to think clearly about the way things are, rather than some idealized/demonized ideological view of where the industry is coming from, or going.
And that brings me back to those ever modest initial Worldcrunch payments. Yes, we have big plans to capture the proverbial “energy of the crowd.” But this particular project will not work without the steady/reliable/available labor of professionals. And so we must hope there is a model by which the talented and hungry (not starving!) will be able to stay in this line of work. Naturally, it will be different from the old labor model dominated by large staffs of fixed professionals. But it also cannot have “free” (or dirt cheap) as its baseline. This tweet was how it crystalized in my head just a week or two after we began paying journos: “Building a News company means having a vision for how journalists will earn a fair wage working for you.”
In just these first two months, when the early reality can’t match that “vision,” I am seeing how the journalists react (each, slightly differently!) to the work and the pay and the betting on our project’s future success. In the back-and-forth, we are coming up with new ideas about what and how stuff gets produced — and I see how it relates to renumeration. The shifting labor economics, indeed, will actually be part of how we shape both the business model and even the substance of the journalism we are producing. We must balance the need to bring great people into the fold with our own bootstrapped finances and future cost/revenue projections. We must be viable, in other words, or we will be providing no work for anyone.
It is clear that news and journalism are a different beast than just generic “content.” As a global news source, we have launched in this trial-by-fire moment of the rolling revolutions in the Arab world. We aren’t yet working directly with Arabic publications, but have gotten some great on-the ground stories and analysis translated from of our top European launch partners. We were also lucky enough to hook up with Kristen Gillespie, an Arabic (and French!) speaker, with 10 years of on-the-ground experience in the Middle East for the likes of CBS Radio, NPR and The Nation. With events unfolding fast, and the region’s media/information transforming before us, Kristen and I came up with this regular feature, Arabica, to give our readers a quick daily tour of what is being said/shared in Arabic. These items, like the pieces we are selecting/translating from the mainstream foreign-language media, must be accurate, reliable, accessible, interesting. They must also be timely. It is work for professionals. (The rubrique is also the kind of germ of an idea that comes in working/brainstorming in a team, rather than in isolation.)
I don’t know yet how we’re going to keep Kristen — or whether Kristen herself will even be able to continue to make a living in the news business. Don’t let the (temporary) influx into Cairo fool you: Kristen’s gigs from her base in Amman were gradually reduced and eliminated over the past few years, with one editor telling her “don’t call us unless Americans are killed.” In her desire to continue in this line of work, I am starting to get an idea how I might gauge my own entrepreneurial foray into the journalism business: We can consider Worldcrunch a success if we can build something that allows others to spend more and more of their time and energy focused on the business of producing the journalism itself.
The Gini coefficient of income and wealth
is now reaching extremes in many countries. This measures the
inequality between the rich and the poor. In the US the Gini coefficient
is now at the same level as in the 1920s before the depression. In
countries like the US, the rich are getting richer whilst 45 million
people live below the poverty line, 43 million receive food stamps and
over 700,000 are homeless. With a real unemployment rate of 22% and
urban youth unemployment much higher, the US will soon experience social
unrest.
But it is not only the US that will
experience financial misery, famine and social unrest. This will also
hit most European countries and in particular the UK, southern Europe,
Eastern Europe and the Baltic States as well as African countries, the
Middle East, Asia, yes in fact the whole world.
Are boom and busts inevitable?
Well if you listened to the former
British Labour Prime Minster Gordon Brown, he proudly declared that he
had abolished booms and busts and thus economic cycles. But he was
expeditiously thrown out at the next bust which of course had nothing to
do with him since he blamed the US sub-prime market for his ill-fated
destiny.
Cycles or ebbs and flows are a natural
part of both economic life and nature. And right at the point when
something could be done to limit the damage, most nations seem to have
the uncanny knack of selecting the political individuals who will put
fuel on the fire and make the situation catastrophically worse.
Greenspan was one such individual.
During his 19 years as Chairman of the Fed, he could have limited the
economic and social damage that the US would suffer. Instead he took
every single measure possible to ensure that there would be a
catastrophe with uncontrollable consequences. But we shouldn’t just
blame the incompetence of Greenspan. It was sickening to watch every
sycophantic congressman and senator licking Greenspan’s boots and
praising his wisdom. Because Greenspan’s money printing and incompetent
interest rate management created one of the biggest financial bubbles in
world economic history. But the politicians loved this. It made the
stock market boom, and house prices surge. Thus the politicians were all
loved by their voters who did not understand the dire consequences that
were looming. And Bernanke de Pompadour is continuing the same
disastrous policies of creating money out of thin air. When will they
ever learn that creating money out of thin air and running astronomical
deficits that never will be repaid with normal money leads to the road
of total ruin? When will they ever learn? The very sad
answer is that they won’t and therefore they are leading the world into a
hyperinflationary depression that will have uncontrollable and
cataclysmic consequences for current and future generations.
Empty stomachs are rioting
We have for years warned about
hyperinflation leading to famine, misery and social unrest. Well, this
is exactly what is happening in many parts of the world. The protests
and overthrowing of regimes in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya are primarily
due to a major part of the peoples of these nations having no job, no
money and little food. It is their empty stomachs that are rioting. In
addition they are protesting against the leaders of these countries
stealing from the people.
It is virtually certain that these riots
will spread to many countries in the Middle East, Africa and the
developing world. This will lead to new regimes and new political orders
that could either be far left or far right politically or religious
extremists. But the new regimes will not be in a position to change the
root of the problem which is famine and poverty. In Egypt for example
there has been a quiet military coup. It is unlikely that a democratic
regime will take over from the military. So the people will protest
again and again. And this will be the same in most countries. Eventually
the people will take the law into their own hands since no regime will
be able to give them the food that they need.
The hyperinflationary deluge is imminent
Although food and fuel inflation is
rampant worldwide already, we are only seeing the very beginning.
Massive oil price rises are likely to continue as a result of the
geopolitical situation as well as peak-oil. The Middle East is a time
bomb waiting to go off. Israel is in an extremely precarious position
and the involvement or non-involvement of the US in this conflict would
both have dire consequences for Israel and peace in the world. Food
prices will continue to rise dramatically. Major parts of the world are
living below the poverty line today and this will increase
exponentially.
The lethal concoction of rising food and
fuel prices is already affecting the Western world. The Continuous
Commodity Index – CCI, (60% food, 17% energy and 23% metals) has almost
doubled since the low in early 2009 and has gone up 42% in the last 12
months. The almost vertical rise of the CCI is one of the best
indicators of hyperinflation being imminent. A catastrophe of
astronomical proportions is looming. This will hit the world at a time
when there is no capacity whatsoever to take any real measures that
could alleviate the problems.
(Click image to enlarge)
Most
countries are already running major deficits which will increase
dramatically in the next few years. The banking system is bankrupt and
is only holding together due to false valuations of toxic debt and
derivatives. This is done with the blessing of governments since
virtually no major bank could face an honest valuation of its assets.
Unemployment and especially youth unemployment is currently a problem
worldwide and it will get much worse. In 2010, the US government spent
60% more than its revenues. In order to balance the budget individual
and corporate income taxes would have to double.
Never before in history has the world run out of real money as well as (affordable) food and fuel simultaneously. But his is exactly what is happening now and it will get substantially worse in the next few months and years.
Financial misery, famine and high
unemployment combined with governments that will not be in a position to
give real help are a recipe for disaster that will lead to social
unrest and revolutions not only in developing countries but also in the
West. Hungry people are desperate people and desperate people do
desperate deeds. We could see already in 2011 food shortages, and riots
both in Europe and in the US.
Hyperinflation Watch
The following are INDISPUTALBLE FACTS:
- The US dollar is down 82% against gold since 1999
- The US dollar is down 49% against the Swiss Francs since 2001
- The Dow Jones is down 81% against gold since 1999
- The Continuous Commodity Index is up 100% since 2009
The above facts are clear evidence of an
economy that has been totally mismanaged. But more importantly most of
these trends are now starting to accelerate – a clear sign that
hyperinflation is just around the corner.
With
years of negative net worth and negative cash flow, the US is bankrupt
today. The Federal deficit is forecast to increase by at least another $
5 trillion in the next 5-7 years. Add to this the State deficits, the
Municipal and City deficits that are rising at a galloping rate and we
have a country that is going to haemorrhage to death in the next few
years. One wonders when the totally ineffective and clueless rating
agencies are going to fathom this. Not that it will matter if they once
do. One also wonders what Mme Bernanke de Pompadour and his court are
thinking. “She” and her courtiers should have above average intelligence
and could not possibly avoid seeing the facts that we all see today (of
course, some of us have seen it coming for over a decade). But “she”
has to please her master King Louis XV Obama and her devotion to the
king goes above all reasonable common sense, or rationale. So the two of
them will continue to crank up the printing press and drown their
people and the world in worthless paper.
Stock Market
To believe that the current money
printing liquidity boom is real and sustainable would be a very serious
and expensive mistake. The temporary and illusionary pickup that we are
now seeing in the economy and stock market is the normal initial phase
of a hyperinflationary economy. It must not be mistaken for a real
improvement in the economy.
The normal pattern at the beginning of a
hyperinflationary period is that stock markets surge. This is the
result of the increased liquidity and a flight to more inflation proof
assets. This was the case in for example the Weimar Republic and
Zimbabwe. Just look at the chart below of the Zimbabwe stock exchange
that went from 1,420 in January 2005 to 5.4 trillion in June 2008, a 3
billion per cent increase. That was of course in Zimbabwe dollars. In
US dollars the stock exchange went sideways with major volatility. So
in hyperinflationary terms stock markets could continue to rise
initially thus making them a better investment than cash. However,
measured against real money, the Dow has gone down 82% against gold
since 1999 and 86% against silver since 2001 (see chart above). We are
currently seeing a dead cat bounce but we expect the Dow to decline a
further 90%, at least, against gold in the next few years. So even if
stock market investments will initially give the illusion of protecting
investors, it will be a very poor hedge against the ravages of
hyperinflation in real terms.
ZIMBABWE STOCK INDEX 2007-2008
Bond market
In January 2009, we warned investors
that long term interest rates were bottoming. Since then the 30 year
bond yield is up from 2.6% to 4.6% an 80% rise. But more importantly the
30 year is currently in the process of breaking a 17 year downtrend
line which dates back to 1994. This confirms that rates will now start a
major and rapid rise which is likely to reach the mid-teens or higher.
Governments will attempt to keep short rates low due to weak economies
but eventually the rising long rates will put strong upward pressure on
the short rates. So the flight to government bonds that we have seen in
the last few years will soon reverse into a massive rush for the exit.
This will coincide with rapidly increasing financing requirements by the
US, UK, EU and many other governments. The poisonous concoction of
rising rates and rising financing needs will create a vicious circle of
collapsing bond markets and unsustainably high financing cost. This will
continue to drive interest rates even higher which will further
increase deficits and necessitate even faster running printing presses.
Add to that a collapsing currency and the hyperinflationary picture is
complete. It is our very strong view that investors should exit bond
markets entirely if they want to avoid a total destruction of their
assets.
Currency Market
As we have explained for many years, hyperinflation is created by the
government destroying the currency as a result of money printing to
finance deficits. This leads to the cost push inflation that we are now
experiencing. Add to that, shortages in commodities worldwide, thus
creating the perfect hyperinflationary scenario. The Dollar, the Pound,
the Euro and many other currencies will continue to decline. They can’t
all decline against each other at the same time so the market will take
turns in attacking one currency at a time. But all currencies will
continue to decline against gold. We believe that the dollar will soon
start a very rapid fall against gold and against many currencies.
Investors should exit the Dollar and also the Pound and the Euro. There
is no currency better than gold or silver but for any small amounts of
cash we prefer the Swiss Franc, the Norwegian Krone, the Singapore
dollar and the Canadian dollar.
Wealth Protection
A hyperinflationary depression will
destroy the value of money as well as most assets that were financed by
the credit bubble (property, stock market). Wealth protection is now
critical and urgent. We see no better way of protecting assets against
total destruction than physical gold and silver stored outside the
banking system. Thereafter, precious metals, energy and food stocks are
our preference. But it must be remembered that any asset including
stocks that is held through a bank is dependent on a sound and surviving
banking system.
The real move in precious metals is
still to come as we have outlined in many articles. Less than 1% of
investors own gold. Before this economic cycle is over we are likely to
see a mania in physical precious metals that will drive prices
exponentially higher. And luckily for investors, this is a mania which
is unlikely to end in a collapse since gold most probably will be part
of a future reserve currency.
Finally we are again quoting von Mises who clearly understood that “le déluge” is inevitable:
“There is no means of avoiding a
final collapse of a boom brought about by credit expansion. The
alternative is only whether the crisis should come sooner as a result of
a voluntary abandonment of further credit expansion or later as a final
and total catastrophe of the currency system involved.” – Ludwig von Mises
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