The Great Recession Blog is conceived

How The Great Recession Blog came into being.

On February 3rd, 2011, I wrote about some ideas to Stan for his own website. As he didn’t take up that focus right away, the idea grew within me to develop my own website on this theme. Many months later I followed through with that and began The Great Recession Blog.

 

Stan,

Are there any web “magazines” that bring together the best and more balanced of the ECONOMIC articles you’ve been sharing and that create a forum for discussing them? Find authors … that present the kind of economic criticism you are not hearing in the mainstream media but have been presenting in these various articles that you share with me…. If you take only the best and hardest-hitting writers, you may be able to create something with potency that gets attention.

The economy is the entire world’s achilles heal right now, so articles that hit right to that center can get the world in its solar plexus. The kinds of hard-hitting economic articles we’ve been discussing back and forth for a couple of years will find a ready audience. There are people hungering for good articles that vent their own rage against the recent and ongoing economic excesses. That is a rising tide, which will provide MANY things to write about in the next few years.

You have worked in that arena much through your travels and through your work with APEC, etc. and are somewhat of a critical “insider” in that sense, so you have connections for getting interviews, promoting the magazine, as well as insights, and you come from a perspective few of your APEC colleagues share. I have written somewhat in that arena through the Downtime feature I was syndicating to newspapers for a few months.

I think that, if you narrow your focus to those particular interests of yours, you have something that could become a voice of reason that gains an audience. Create something more potent and build out very slowly from that, always keeping to the center, which is the economic discussion [about the Great Recession]. That is the biggest discussion in the world right now; yet 98% of what is is being published is pablum that reiterates the same tired old thinking, whether from conservative or liberal sources.

People are more apt to respond strongly and positively to finding a motherload of the one thing they are most interested in than in finding broad mix that still requires they sift through to find the few articles they want.

 

On February 4th, the concept for The Great Recession Blog crystalized a little more:

I think focusing on the economy from the perspective of economic sustainability might be better. I don’t know if there are sites that take the critical stance on the economy rescue efforts that you and I have taken in our exchanges. The present approaches to economic rescue are so UNsustainable. I suppose there would be such sites, but they cannot have been around long, as the whole fiasco has not been around long.

So, I was thinking in terms of a niche that has a lot of interest (BIG niche). Also, this niche has a lot of buried rage that could feed interest in a site that gives voice to that anger. I don’t mean creating an angry magazine site, but putting forward the kind of criticism that those who are angry would like to voice but don’t have a platform from which to be heard … or maybe don’t know how to express their frustration well.

Let good writers say it for them, and they will grab those words and share them with others, building an audience by word-of-mouth.

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