Monday Morning: When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough... Advertise.

Good morning. News item: The OC Register reports pending sales of new homes in California were down 37 percent on an annual basis in March. As the housing slump continues, the National Association of Realtors is increasing its advertising spending ("It's a Great Time to Buy or Sell a Home") by 60% this year, to $40 million.

Will the subprime mess climb up the credit scale? If it does, Alt-A mortgages are next, and there is strong enterprise reporting here by the Register's mortgage expert, Mathew Padilla, pointing to looming troubles in the Alt-A mortgage category.

The high preists of journalism often criticize blogs as "not really journalism," much the same way country club golfers look down on duffers who populate the muni courses. Personally, I have seen some excellent journalism -- not just aggregation -- on the housing bubble blogs, and some lousy reportage (Jayson Blair anyone?) in the papers. FreeErisa.com makes the case here for the reliabilty of housing bubble blogs, pointing out, "The bloggers are more factual than theoretical, at a time when many economists and analysts are missing or sugar-coating critical facts."

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Comments

[Fernando]

Hey Peter: Why is your blog not being linked to off of the latimes main page? Is the Times afraid of offiending too many realtors?

That certainly seems to be the situation with the Times' Real Estate section, which really boosted the boom market while it was going on, but now rarely discusses what is going on the market. Rather, we just get "Realty Transactions of the Rich and Famous." It's like ignoring the elephant in the room. I have to read this blog and the Business section to get any serious real estate news, instead of the Real Estate section. What gives?

[Pete Viles]

Fernando -- Thanks for the comment and thanks for reading. The editors at the website are not afraid of offending Realtors; they are not afraid of offending me, either -- they are rotating the slate of blogs listed on the homepage, and this blog "rotated out" over the weekend. The goal, as I understand it, is to give some of the other blogs their turn in the "homepage spotlight." You can still find LA Land by clicking on the "More blogs" link in the "blog box" on the homepage.

FYI, one of those blogs, "Evolution of a Website," explains changes in the
Times' website itself, and addresses this issue of where the blogs are listed here:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/evolution/2007/05/mobiles_martini.html

Here's the relevant paragraph: "Ted and DMC asked why their favorite blogs -- the Homicide Report and the Bottleneck Blog -- were no longer listed on the home page. Don't fear, they will appear. We like to change things out on the home page and showcase new blogs each day."

Thanks again for the comment. I hope LA Land will be directly linked on the homepage again soon.

Pete