Discourse and dialogue has become growing feature of financial news coverage

A rapidly developing feature of online news coverage is Comments. From articles to blogs, readers are now actively encouraged to respond. A French site called Rue89 shows this to good effect where news is seen as a collaborative effort between the author and the readers. Personally, I have changed my reading habits and find I am equally interested in reading the comments or some of them and the original story and blog.

The financial crisis has highlighted the impact of this dialogue and discussion. Huffington Post, the world's most read blog, will typically get over a 1000 comments on mainstream pieces. Take the lead story about the failure of the vote in Congress on Monday night. The Financial Times news-by-the-minute blog and community site, Alphaville has comments which at times of crisis in recent weeks have gone as high as 500 comments. While economist Nouriel Roubini regularly gets several hundred comments on his increasingly influential blog.

What is interesting is that anyone following the comments on blogs in the USA would have seen that the US financial rescue package, $700bn, now known as TARPS, was going to be a very difficult sell. Main street America was furious at the idea of Wall Street bankers being bailed out. Mainstream media did not really reflect this conflict strongly enough and perhaps was an example where they saw their loyalty to the markets and perceived protection of them, not their readers. It will be interesting to see how the debate develops in the media about going back to Congress a second time. Even experienced commentators are unsure of the measure and it was interesting to note that George Magnus, a senior economist with UBS believes that the money could be used in other ways.