Financial bloggers and the Treasury

Brian Stelter of The New York Times writes about how the Treasury Department has reached out to financial bloggers in the past week.

Stelter writes, “Tyler Cowen, an economics professor at George Mason University who has written at the Marginal Revolution blog for six years, said it was the first time he had heard from any Treasury official.

“The meeting ‘shows that the Obama administration is working very hard on outreach to a lot of different media sources,’ he said.

“The Treasury invited about 20 bloggers. Eight attended — at their own expense — including some ardent critics of the department. Michael J. Panzner, who writes the Financial Armageddon blog, said the invitation ‘was totally out of the blue.’

“Andrew Williams, a spokesman for the Treasury who assembled the event, said that Mr. Geithner had ‘long valued the blogosphere’ and mentioned that during Mr. Geithner’s tenure as the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, he had requested a daily compendium of relevant blog posts.

Read more here.