Felix Salmon

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In the latest version of the Atlantic’s “What I Read,” Buzzfeed’s Ben Smith bemoans the end of The Great Blog Era of the Early Aughts:

“I still read some bloggers but it’s sort of a lost art. There aren’t new great bloggers. It’s not the next thing. But the generation of Choire Sicha, Micky Kaus, Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall are great and they never stopped being great. Andrew is no longer the conservative he once was but he and Josh are masters of the medium.”

It’s easy to understand why Smith would say “there aren’t new great bloggers.” The era defined by a few influential voice-heavy bloggers has been declared over by Nick Denton (“I’m out of blogs”), the New York Times (“Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts…”) Jason Calcannis (“Blogging is largely dead”) and Felix (“…dying, even if it’s not quite dead”).

For a brief, heady few years blogs were supposed to be the future of media. What happened instead, besides book deals, was that, as Felix suggested last year, the tools bloggers use were co-opted by media companies.

Suddenly, Andrew Sullivan and Choire Sicha weren’t the only people who could pull out great quotes from otherwise dry news copy: everybody could, and did, on Twitter. Meanwhile, places like the Huffington Post and Business Insider moved the focus of blogging away from engaging with the blogosphere and towards the art of headline writing. And thus did the great blogging tradition of analysis and back-and-forth-argument get lost, amid a thousand rewriters, blockquoters and aggregators.

But the good old days argument of the Internet doesn’t completely hold up.The finance and econoblogosphere for one, is rich, varied, frequently contemptuous and not in any way dead.

Keeping in mind that the blogs-are-dead meme is largely an issue of semantics, here’s a list of new and not-so-new-ish bloggers that you should absolutely start reading.

Mathbabe
Sober Look
The Reformed Broker
The New York Fed
MuniLand
The Bonddad Blog
Derek Thompson
The Atlantic Cities
Josh Barro
Dan Alpert
Matt O’Brien
Neil Collins
Matt DeBord
ISDA Media Comment
Bloomberg View – The Ticker
And, definitely, Huffington Post Divorce.

What else are we missing? Email us suggestions at Counterparties.Reuters@gmail.com

And on to today’s links:

Be Afraid
Gooogle begins testing its new “augmented reality” glasses – NYTimes

Long Reads
Why exports will “resurrect the United States as a global economic power” – American Interest

Welcome to Adulthood
Student loan interest rates are set to double this summer unless Congress acts – Politico

Penalties
Regulators just penalized JPMorgan for actions tied to Lehman’s demise – NYT
JPMorgan, Citi, UBS move prop traders to asset management to skirt Volcker Rule – Reuters

EU Mess
Spain’s fate is the hands of the ECB, natch – WSJ
Spain, como se dice “contagion”? – MacroScope
Greece is now too broke to field a track and field team – AP

Alpha
“Winner” and “loser” hedge funds are more likely to stay that way – Sober Look

Investigations
Regulators proving “Hide Not Slide” HFT that could allow investors to game exchanges – WSJ
The U.K. trader known for a $300k bar tab has been arrested – CityAm

Marketing Costs
Buy your CEO a profile in Chinese Esquire for $20,000 a page – NYT

Cognitive Dissonance
China’s premier is now complaining about the banking monopolies his country owns – Reuters

Regulations
It will soon be easier for Wall Street analysts to talk up companies their employers do business with – Bloomberg

Tinker/Tailor/Curator/Spy
The CIA secretly promoted Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko for more than 20 years - The Independent
Annals of art world skullduggery, Larry Gagosian edition – Felix

Wonks
Laura Tyson: U.S. multinationals are not abandoning America - Project Syndicate

Indicators
CoreLogic: Home prices fell to a new post-bubble low in Feb. - Calculated Risk

Remuneration
Ex-Thomson Reuters CEO gets a pay package worth $20 million – Reuters

IPOs
Burger King is about to go public again – Bloomberg

Studies
Young Americans are money-crazed organ harvesting zombies – Reason