People who turn to the financial pages of the established media do so largely because of their own financial concerns.  Wanting reassurance - that share prices and real estate prices are going up, that interest rates are staying low, that “confidence indicators” are improving, that jobs are secure (theirs, if nobody else’s) and that profitability is rising. Financial journalists are not employed to dash those hopes but to help to preserve the “confidence” that is the most important commodity in contemporary capitalism. Read PS Burton on Financial Journalists here

Established media however, is a lot more trusted than online - and rightly so -  ” A hundred million stock-hyping e-mails are sent each week, according to Christopher Cox, the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the body that oversees American financial markets. ” According to anti-virus and spam detection specialists at the online security company Sophos, these financial fraud e-mails now account for 15 per cent of all daily spam, up from 0.8 per cent in January last year. This type of scam knocks confidence in the online space, particularly in older demographics. Apparently if you only read your news in newsprint, not a computer or cellphone screen, you have liver spots and brittle hips.
But it is just a case of catering to your different audiences to deliver information. Newspapers are now not in the newspaper business- but the information business. Funneling breaking news and youth-oriented content to the Internet, where timeliness is critical and a battle of speed & fact not journalistic craft. Reserving the print version for top quality investigative news and long-form feature stories, where there will always be a place.

Who is Lewis Jacobs? And why is he e-mailing me out-of-the-blue investment advice? He has sent me something called a “momentum alert” for an obscure Vancouver-based start-up called AGA Resources, which, according to company press releases has yet to earn any revenues, but has just acquired “a mineral property” in British Columbia and diamond core drilling equipment.