Paris: Last week saw the launch of a new blog by a well-known name among shipping social media. Olaf Merk’s Shipping Today promises – according to the site’s opening post – promises to kick off a “critical discussion” on the industry.
“Shipping is essential to world trade and the well-being of nations, which seems to have made it immune to fundamental questions,” Merk noted in the blog’s debut.
Merk is a senior policy analyst at the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), based in Paris. Prior to the OECD, he worked at the Netherlands Ministry of Finance.
“I hope this blog could become one of the platforms for serious discussion on shipping,” he tells Maritime CEO. He says he will regularly post blogs that ask the “painful fundamental questions”, to provoke discussion and to comment on what happens.
Merk feels both the shipping press and the mainstream media are not doing enough to cover shipping properly, telling Maritime CEO: “As for the maritime media, many of them seem to be more of a mouthpiece of the industry than a gadfly. Some of them are too dependent on the industry to be really critical.”
