As for the NYC wages, there are errors on both sides: it’s just as silly to use household income as a basis of comparison as it is to use old numbers — and I used the old numbers because they were the most accurate ones I could find. I feel that I was making quite a subtle point, saying yes on the one hand this is good, but then on the other hand, and people ended up concentrating only on the second part and not on the first. That’s fine, maybe they need to feel that they’re inhabiting the unalloyed moral high ground. But I think that a lot of things are more complicated than they might at first seem.

Finally, yes I change my mind, and I do it in public. I changed my mind on mortgage-backed securities, on whether nominally recourse mortgages were actually recourse in reality, on whether charging for anti-malarial bed nets was a good idea — even, causing quite a stir by doing so, on whether nationalizing banks was a good idea. I actually pride myself on changing my mind more than just about any other blogger out there in the economics and finance space: what I find valuable is the debate, not the destination. But you’re right that probably I should do it more often.

Short story: you get credit for acknowledging you
are wrong when this turns out to be objectively so (not a small feat!), but I am thinking about opinions: you have them so forcefully and publicise them so immediately: is there no case where a few hours reflection (and maybe some comments to help you along) make you rethink? If never, well … I think highly enough of you so don’t believe this … so ignore this case. But if you do ever revisit your opinions, how does this show up in your blog?

Your BreakingViews comments an issue apart. You wrote a strongly worded opinion centered around a prediction, and from your language everyone could see you were going out on a limb; yet many months later reality proved otherwise. And credit it due for not just ignoring it, but acknowledging that your prediction was wrong and speculating why – this is a good thing. It’s hard, but just not _that_ hard.

But my concerns are not over this. Let’s start with the
“facts unravel in real time” thing. There are now very many examples, this one sticks in my mind for some reason:
http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/20 09/12/14/private-jet-divas-miss-their-me eting-with-obama/
Within small hours of posting, it turned out your premise was incorrect and you IMO _slowly_ added updates while keeping the story as is. The provocative title remains, the text remains. Personally, I would added a new first sentence acknowelding that everything to come was basically bogus AND retracted the traffic-whore title. You can keep the text online, including the title, but there’s a difference between “I SCREWED UP (here’s what I originally wrote)” and “My original story (By the way: “Update”s, the underlying facts are wrong.)

Now let’s get to more subjective things. Your opinion on ProPublica internshipts was wrong IMO and the comments, both opinionative and factual (e.g. your error about NYC wages) should be convincing to someone of your calibre. But this is one issue people can disagree on. Yet I’ve seen many such recently. FREQUENTLY I read a story and think I agree and think I have learned something, but then read the commentary or related news and revise my opinion. “Don’t give money to Haiti” was another example where I felt this way. You can differ on these examples.. But the point is: I _never_ see you do this.
“This == unforced, revisit the opinion you formed and posted in the first moments after after some event”

You are not a primary source for facts; you offeopinion. Yet somehow, you never revisit your opinion
unless facts force you too and even so you bring the philosopy of a 20′th century newspaper (We can print a legally-minimal correction, in the smallest font possible, on page 27, rather than change things to say
“I was wrong/changed my mind”. Even if you are changing
an opinion piece 2 hours old!).

Short short version: Are you a news source, or are you an opinion source? If the latter, and given you under pressure to react ASAP to everything, don’t you think there shoudl be a few “Well, I’ve rethought this, and…”
posts/corrections?

But of course I don’t in any way consider my opinions to be inviolable after I’ve published them. I contradict my previous opinions often, sometimes in the space of one day. One of my slogans is that “if you’re never wrong, you’re never interesting”. Ask me one of these days about that whole series of blog entries I wrote about CPDOs. Or, for that matter, the long post I wrote on why Reuters wouldn’t buy Breakingviews.

As for “competing with Reuters for talent”, you not only can, but you do: Jesse Eisinger being a prime example. But there isn’t any kind of competitive market in interns, where the Top Talent ends up working for the news organization which pays its interns the most money. Why does Reuters pay its interns that kind of money? I don’t know, ask them — but I suspect that the Guild would not look kindly on any attempt to bring in journalism practitioners on the cheap.

Maybe you are confident of your opinion on this particular issue. But I agree with #3 you do tend from time to time produce absolute “howlers”, but I’ve never
seen you clearly retract any opinion in the original forum – if anywyere. Worse, there have been times when you form an opinion on something that turns out to be factually incorrect, and your blog remains unchanged in form. At best “X!!! Hence, long discusive hence Y….”. Becomes “X!!! Long discursive hence Y… . (Update: by the way, I was misinformed, X isn’t at all true.)”

I’ve been a big fan, but it’s becoming increasingly
offputting to me how the commercial demand to produce incessent provocative comments appear to corrupt your honest thoughtfulness. I think it’s inconsistent to try
to post your off-the-cuff impressions on every hot topic
as soon as you have an emotional thought about it, and at the same time as you push a dictum that “I wrote it down in my blog, it’s inviolable now”.

-bxg2:

N.b. congratulations. You sometimes load on firefox.
Great advance since last month. It took three minues before your partner sites gave up trying to spam be, but you got through. All congrat’s to Reuter’s tech team. 1990′s, here we come!

The signaling argument is just bizarre. Why would you discourage higher paying internships? They make it possible for those without Daddy’s trust fund waiting for them to take the job.

“NYC is _very_ expensive”

So is London, and most full time London based journos don’t earn anything like $700 a week. Starting salaries are typically in the low double digits per year, and apart from a handful of editors and columnists, even experienced journos are lucky to earn £30k-£40k a year.

The above posts are dead on. I’ll add that the low pay-scale in many public interest jobs guarantees that they are held mostly either by the idle children of the rich or the least competent workers available (with a few highly-frustrated competent idealists mixed in). Those who have useful talents tend to want to earn enough money that they don’t have to share a studio apartment with three people and eat Ramen every day for the rest of their life. There’s a reason that our bankers repeatedly outmanuever our banking regulators, and it has a lot to do with the fact that our bankers are funded at 10-100x the level of the people who are supposed to be clever, experienced, and motivated enough to regulate complex financial institutions. Maybe if Reuters could afford to pay a little more we’d get a financial blogger who knows something about how to interpret statistics and complex financial issues. You write about interesting topics with a witty style, but your last few weeks have been full of howlers that never get corrected.