New generation of financial content changes IR profession

Seeking Alpha CEO David Jackson talks with Elaine Sattler of Investor Relations News how financial content from investment professionals and bloggers — non-journalists — could change the IR profession.

Here is an excerpt:

IRN: Most IROs are extremely suspicious of blogs. Bloggers are often anonymous, they don’t perform proper fact checking, and they might publish negative articles to manipulate a stock.

Jackson: Those concerns are legitimate, but they need to be seen in context. The financial media landscape is changing. For years, journalists working for the leading financial Web sites have pumped out huge volumes of articles in an attempt to cover thousands of stocks. Those articles are often rewrites of press releases that add insufficient value. Many readers are sick of that. They want something more thoughtful, opinionated, and actionable. That’s why our opinion and analysis articles, some of which are from blogs, are so popular.

IRN: Just because blog content is popular doesn’t mean it’s safe or admirable.

Jackson: Correct. The key challenge is: How do you find the blog articles that are high quality and high integrity, and filter out the articles that are low quality and low integrity? This challenge is exactly the focus of Seeking Alpha. We have a team of editors who review every article submitted to us. We ascertain that the authors are legitimate, that they disclose positions in stocks they’re writing about, and that their articles are high quality.

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