Counterparties : Felix Salmon and Ryan McCarthy’s dark twisted fantasy
Counterparties is a curated snapshot of the best finance news and commentary. It’s also an experiment: what would a news website look like if it didn’t need to promote its own content, and just linked to the best stories and posts, regardless of source? We believe that the best way to get people to come back is to send them away: click on a headline, go straight to another site, and see for yourself. And if you click instead on the “All Sources” link, you’ll see a list of everybody else who’s linking to that story.
Counterparties combines our own judgment — what we find interesting, overlooked and important — with the recommendation engine created by our friends at Percolate. That engine regularly monitors all the blogs and Twitter feeds that Felix follows, and keeps an eye out for stories it thinks we’ll find most interesting. The stories we love go into The River, on the right of the page; we’ll move the best to the site’s main section, on the left.
Counterparties is not a finished product. Please let us know what you think: if you like it, we may expand the idea into other areas of coverage. And if you have a suggestion, a complaint, or something we should link to, email us here.
Enjoy!
Felix & Ryan
For one thing, Salmon delights in argument. “I’m rude about a lot of people on the Internet,” he says brightly. “And half the time, I change my mind anyway. … I love being wrong.” Famous targets include conservative economist Ben Stein, Business Insider’s Henry Blodget, the proudly slimy hedge-funder Anthony Scaramucci, and certain fonts that he considers to be tasteless. (He once stormed out of a Reuters meeting because the agenda had been rendered in Comic Sans.)
TV news is ultimately much more an arm of the entertainment industry than it is of the news industry. Its star anchors get paid millions of dollars because they’re popular on TV, not because of their reporting skills; and while the occasional news magazine program will sometimes break news, newspapers and websites have always been the undisputed leaders on that front.
Watching a big bank try to be all cool and down with the social kids can be rather like watching your father try to rap. The Twitter feed is embarrassing enough, but the sponsored posts are much worse.
I think this is my favorite Felix TV video yet.
Reuters finance blogger Felix Salmon targets the art world’s latest spotty trend. Clue: short stripes
Would a Mitt Romney presidency be a boon for Wall Street?
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon and Noam Scheiber, author of “The Escape Artists” and senior editor at The New Republic, discuss what a Romney presidency might mean for the financial industry.
Reuters blogger Felix Salmon found his hands-down favorite swag at the 2012 South by Southwest conference: iPad etching.
See what Felix had permanently lasered on his iPad at SxSW and watch the etching process.
Breaking News from SXSW: Reuters blogger Felix Salmon has learned from an unnamed source that CNN will buy social media website Mashable for more than $200 million. The source says an announcement is expected for Tuesday. (March 12, 2012)
