Jagow trades host’s chair for a shot into the blogosphere
After hosting Marketplace Morning Report for more than three years, Scott Jagow traded an audience of 5.3 million weekly radio listeners for a chance to make his mark on the blogosphere, where he has merely thousands of readers so far — and thousands of competitors.
For Marketplace, it’s also a chance to land CPB support for covering the financial crisis — the subject of multiple CPB grant initiatives expected in coming weeks.
Early last month, Jagow became online editor of Marketplace’s website, author of its new Scratch Pad blog and host of its weekly podcast After the Bell. “Everything seems to be going to the Internet, and I thought of this as a great opportunity to write more and interact with people,” Jagow said. “I love to write.”
Jagow also decided to apply for the blogging job because he was tiring of the night-owl schedule required to prep a show in California for early-morning broadcast in the East. His workday as a radio host started at 1 a.m.
Jagow’s new assignment is part of a larger push to liven up Marketplace.publicradio.org by giving it personality, said J.J. Yore, executive producer and programming v.p. for American Public Media. “The key to that was having a person who could be the face or voice of the website — a blogger.”
Jagow “has a great writing style that we felt would be really effective on the Web,” Yore said.
Marketplace’s new push for online audiences will be funded in part by a grant from a new CPB initiative that backs collaborations on web-based economic coverage, Yore said. CPB’s objective, he said, “is to create a curated aggregation of the most interesting news and information out there about the economy, and what’s now called the recession.”
CPB will issue a request for proposals later this month for such collaborations, said spokeswoman Louise Filkins. Yore said CPB has discussed spending $2.5 million on the initiative.
In addition, CPB will allocate up to $1 million for 10 matching grants to stations developing community engagement projects about hard-times issues along the lines of the mortgage crisis project at KETC in St. Louis, said V.P. Mark Erstling.
On Scratch Pad, Jagow covers the same editorial ground as Marketplace—business and economics topics mixed with lighter “bright spots” that add variety and human interest.
“It’s more about adding a new element to Marketplace’s coverage of the economy—a place where people can go that’s a little different than what they’ve heard on the radio or expounds on what they heard on the radio,” Jagow said. He’s not looking to break news on his blog but to give readers an alternative take on what’s being reported elsewhere.
For the CPB-backed collaboration, he looks out for economic stories from other pubcasters. “I’ll pick out something that catches my eye, point out what different people are saying about it and tie it in with my own opinions.”
Last week Jagow posted blog items about:
- the spat between excitable CNBC investment commentator/host James Cramer and Jon Stewart of The Daily Show over Cramer’s failure to warn his audience about the risky lending practices of Bear Stearns and other failed investment banks;
- the real reason why the stock market rallied March 10 after Citigroup announced it was running a profit (it had more to do with short-selling than Citigroup’s financial position, Jagow reported); and
- the government’s plan to entice private investors to buy toxic assets. Jagow riffed off an embedded video of Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner’s remarks on PBS’s Charlie Rose March 10, pointedly linking to a New York Times story, “The Looting of America’s Coffers,” about an early-1990s research paper on how private investors reaped big profits from dubious lending schemes. The government cleaned up the mess back then, too.
“I’m trying to have fun with it,” Jagow said. “When I hosted the radio show, people said they liked my sense of humor. I’m trying with the blog to carry that further.”
Jagow also gets to be opinionated in the blog, though he’s careful to put facts behind his opinions and acknowledge contrary views. “In order to establish credibility, you have to be thoughtful about what you’re saying, back it up, and point to what other people are saying so you have a diversity of opinion represented,” Jagow said. “I don’t have strong political views, but I have practical views about how things could work.”
“I think of myself as a people’s blogger,” Jagow said. “I’m not sure if it’s accurate, but it’s something that I strive for—to allow people’s opinions to come in, and respect them.”
Marketplace is adding oomph to its After the Bell podcast, which had been a collection of the program’s best stories of the week. Shortened from 30 to roughly 15 minutes, it now offers more analysis of what happened in the past week.
Jagow was touched and surprised by listener e-mails he received after announcing that he was leaving the morning newscast. Working as a radio host “in the middle of the night in a dark studio, you don’t know the connection that’s happening between you and the audience,” he said. “They think of you as a friend or someone who’s in their life everyday.”
His online audience is much smaller but growing. Scratch Pad recorded more than 9,700 unique visitors and more than 20,400 page impressions in February, according to Nielsen Online data provided by Richard Core, Marketplace online editor. As of March 11, the blog was on track to beat last month’s traffic: It logged nearly 11,000 visitors and 19,100 page impressions.
“I’d like to get to that point where I have a bigger following,” Jagow said, “but the only way to do that is to do a thorough job and do something distinctive from what other bloggers are doing.”
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Web page posted March 16, 2009
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
