What Wall Street watchers read (Re-post)

March 7th, 2010

There’s a fascinating insight into what Reuters’s highly prolific financial blogger, Felix Salmon, reads and how he spends his days, in the Atlantic Monthly. The most interesting insights come in the middle of the piece, where New York-based Salmon says:

The meat of what I read at the office is from my RSS reader. I useNetNewsWire and have God-knows-how many hundreds of subscriptions … I find myself clicking on the feeds with fewer unread items. When there are really good bloggers who don’t post very often, I will read everything they write. John Hempton,Epicurean Dealmaker, Mike Konczal, Steve Waldman …

I have my laptop running TweetDeck. I have two screens for my official Reuters PC running the Reuters terminal, e-mail and messaging services. And then I have two screens connected to my Mac Mini, which is where I do my real work. The right-hand screen is for the feeds coming in on NetNewsWire and Twhirl, and the left-hand one is for e-mail, web browsing, iChat, PDF documents and drafting blog entries.

At the end of the piece Salmon reveals that he’s no fan on The Economist, writing “I definitely don’t read The Economist. I don’t like that kind of air of omniscient, Balliol College superciliousness.” Ouch!

In another article in the same series, Liar’s Poker author and Bloomberg columnist Michael Lewis says:

I don’t tweet, I don’t Twitter, I couldn’t even tell you how to read or where to find a Twitter message. I don’t actually see the point of limiting communication to a haiku. I find the whole effusion of communications technology bewildering …. I have an email address and I’m thinking of shutting that down

I look at aggregation sites sometimes, like RealClearMarkets. It’s run by libertarians, clearly, but they do drag in everything that’s written about finance.

Actually, if you were to draw a pie chart of where I get news from, I bet I get a third from whatever people in Berkeley—specifically the parents’ at my kids’ school—are outraged about. I’m surrounded by people who are alive to what’s going on in the world and who are quick to be outraged by it.

To read the original articles from Atlantic Monthly click below:-

• Felix Salmon: What I Read
• Michael Lewis: What I Read

* username: rupertbu