Introducing The Pinpoint Press ~ sensible analysis for sensible people

Better media for a better America

Hi, friends. The Rick Report is growing up and it’s now The Pinpoint Press. I started The Rick Report a few days after I left Yahoo Finance at the beginning of September. The plan was to keep reporting without interruption and test the water for starting my own news operation.

I’ve tested the water and I’m jumping in.

The Pinpoint Press will expand on the work I’ve done for years as an analyst striving to make busy people as smart as they can be about what’s happening in money and politics. I’m freer now to experiment and try new ways to present information and connect with people. I’ve heard from a lot of you in the past and I hope you’ll keep telling me what you like, what you want more of, and what stinks.

The mission of The Pinpoint Press is to serve sensible, pragmatic Americans fed up with two failed political parties and a media establishment that plays the same insider game as the politicians. Republicans are corrupt. Democrats are feeble. They’re all fleecing taxpayers who deserve competent government. There are some great journalists doing terrific work, but much of the corporate media simply provides an echo chamber for self-dealing politicians abusing their constituents.

These are The Pinpoint Principles. They’ll guide the work you find here, which will tell you want matters in money and politics, and also what doesn’t matter.

You’ll see a heavy focus on affordability, wealth inequality and opportunity inequality. These are defining issues of our time with major political implications that have been playing out since the financial crash nearly 20 years ago.

I invented the Better-Off Barometer to track what the data says about whether we’re worse off or better off. My former Yahoo Finance colleague Dave Foster created the graphics. We do a 1-year and a 4-year comparison and update the data at least once a month.

The Pinpoint Press has a Trumponomics dashboard where anybody can check out how the Trump economy is doing compared with prior presidents going back to Jimmy Carter in the 1970s. Moody’s Analytics provides the data and Dave Foster makes the charts.

A recurring feature of The Pinpoint Press will be Short Guides on complex issues the mainstream media tends to bungle. There’s a lot of insider reporting that doesn’t explain the basics for people who live outside the Beltway or are just busy living ordinary lives. My first Short Guide was on the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. That’s not something I normally cover, but most of the breathless reporting I’ve seen on this trumpets some incremental new development without explaining the big picture. So I created my own Short Guide to Epstein, for busy people who just want to know what matters.

There’s a lot of absurdity among us, and you can read all about it in The Haiku News. Why not have a little fun? Plus, I like to challenge myself as a writer. I invite everybody to improve on my haikus in the comments, for everybody to see, or send them straight to me and who knows, maybe I’ll publish a few.

I’m grateful for the friends and supporters who have been cheering me on so far. Please continue helping me craft a news operation that makes the media better, and strives to make America better. Hey! Not a bad slogan! 😄