Fundamentals of Interactive Journalism

Honda has cut its annual profit forecast by 62%, Toyota delayed its U.S. plant plan, and the Big Three were still waiting for the rescue plan amid falling global car demand and the global financial crisis. In China, BYD launched a new clean energy car series – F3DM, which is the first electronic sedan in China.

What happened in the automobile industry and what’s the future ahead? None of us knows the right answer right now, just like 50 years ago, everyone was eagerly looking forward to a job opportunity in that industry for no reason.

Car-makers around the world have been announcing lower forecast of sales and profit together with job cuts, and leading US car-makers have been trying to persuade the government to approve a car industry bailout plan.

Everyone is talking about clean energy new model for automobile industry. But after every big manufacturer has Hybrid car series, no one knows if the clean energy cars

can rescue the automobile industry out of trouble.

I’d support the bankruptcy plan of the Big Three, since only on this way, they can get rid of the heavy pressure of retired employees’ compensation and medical aid packages. I’m no idea why in a free market country, there are companies who have to take responsibilities to cover all the retired employee’s compensation and their medical care packages for such a long period.

Additionally, the Big Three haven’t focused on automobile industry for a long time, but investing in the finance field, which made them slump with the crisis. In our impression, automobile industry should be the representative of the real economy, but recent turmoil disclosed that they’ve been involved in the finance economy for a longer time than we expected.

This past Thursday afternoon I headed downtown to take pictures of a protest of the Wall Street bailout for a class assignment. I arrived early and found a couple of guys offering fliers to passersby near the bull sculpture at Bowling Green. They told me they’d learned about the event online and didn’t know exactly who had organized it. As I waited for the action to begin, I watched tourists taking photos of their friends standing next to the bull’s hindquarters or groping its legendary testicles.

Eventually protesters, journalists and onlookers began gathering at the site. The crowd of demonstrators included Socialists, members of Code Pink and other anti-war groups, and individual New Yorkers angered by the proposed government rescue of financial institutions. Spectators looked on curiously as cops advised people to stay out of the street. (more…)

Sometimes it’s exciting, breathtaking even, to stand on the media’s rooftop and watch the fiery implosions of our economy.

Today, I found that the bank I keep my money in, Washington Mutual, has fallen. The government seized the enormous thrift on its birthday and quickly sold it off to JP Morgan & Chase. This is the biggest banking collapse in U.S. history.

The recent failures reminded me of stories of earlier decades, about how people would gather on a mesa somewhere and watch the U.S. military conduct nuclear tests. First there was the flash, then the picturesque cloud formation. Then the echo of the blast wave struck, dousing the hapless observers with radiation.

The Washington Mutual collapse is nothing I didn’t see coming. But before, I was merely watching the devastation from afar. Now, I finally feel its heat.

The FDIC says that my money is secure. They did not have to reach into their coffers for the (how strange it is to say this) measly $45 billion. Though consolidation continues on Wall Street with JP Morgan and Bank of America reaching supergiant status, I wonder how long the mightiest pillars can continue to stand.

It’s strange. I’d heard about panicked citizens standing in lines, waiting for their money in the decades gone by. I could never imagine what that must be like. Now, that situation actually has a chance of happening. Today, some of WaMu’s legion of customers will be at their branches, pulling out hard. I will be among them.

Other questions smolder in my mind – what will happen to my student loans? Will I be able to receive the amount I need? How will New York handle the cut in social services? And will other nations, tired of United States’ fading superpower status smell blood in the water and assert themselves?

I don’t know. No one knows. The bailout is in limbo with Democratic and Republican opposition to Paulson’s plan. Apparently the treasurer got down on one knee in front of Pelosi, which, while a joke, symbolizes the entire predicament of taxpayers being asked to pick up the unfortunately necessary bill.

Allright. Enough doom and gloom out of me. Here are some cheering news about smaller banks apparently thriving through the crisis. If we survive this one without a depression, the fall of the investment banks and centralized risk players may even be a good thing. With all the consolidation, however, the number of players had diminished and their power, greatly increased.

 As George W. and Henry Paulson Jr. pressure Congress to “act quickly” and pass the $700 billion bailout, Stephen Colbert reminds us tonight that it took Congress nearly 10 years to agree to raise the federal minimum wage. 

Speaking of wages…in 2007, Forbes put together this nice little chart listing the salaries of bank CEOs. Bank of America’s Kenneth Lewis raked in $99.8 mil in ‘06.  I don’t know about you guys, but I was making $6.90 an hour that year.  Maybe while us taxpayers save the financial markets, Ken could pay off a few of my student loans.

Or, perhaps the $700 billion could be used in one of the scenarios Jeff Jarvis proposes, such as sending 23 million Americans to public universities.

Lehman Bros is filing for bankruptcy. Merrill Lynch is being bought. Denied the comfort of rock bottom, Wall Street continues its descent into the deeper layers of a financial Dante’s Inferno.

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