Reading Between the Whines

There are several near-constants in an insurance editor’s life when a new year rolls around. There’s the inevitable mistake of putting last year’s date on this week’s article. There’s the added frustration of trying to contact sources over the holidays when nobody seems to be working. And, of course, there’s the unavoidable debate over what have been the biggest insurance stories of the past year.

Rather than pull a few items out of thin air — a wholly unscientific method — we at Insurance Journal decided to do our own research, utilizing our online archives of insurance stories which we tout as the largest insurance article archives in the world. At least after Google.

When we took a look back at the five most-read stories of 2008 on our Web site, insurancejournal.com, we wanted to figure out what readers might consider the most important. Sure it’s a popularity contest based on how many people read the articles — but maybe it’s better than six whiny, overworked editors trying to justify their existence by insisting that their favorites were also the readers’ favorites. What we found is something we should have expected: The biggest stories of 2008 involve issues that will likely have a major impact on 2009. They were:

What struck us about this list is how the most-read stories of 2008 are likely to be the defining industry issues of 2009 — three of them in particular. The most-read piece was a breaking news story from April announcing Liberty Mutual Group’s acquisition of Safeco Corp., a deal that created the fifth-largest property/casualty insurer and second-largest surety writer in the country. That acquisition, which fused Safeco into Liberty Mutual’s Agency Markets, created an organization with 15,000 independent agencies — a behemoth whose every move will likely have a significant impact on the entire independent agency system in 2009 and beyond.

And as one might expect, several of the top five stories involved the insurance company no one can stop talking about: AIG. Number two was an exclusive piece from our own Andrew Simpson in September detailing how – despite assurances that AIG insurance subsidiaries are sound – producers across the country had begun moving accounts from AIG affiliates. Number five was a Reuters piece detailing how AIG’s collapse and fire sale is shifting the dynamics of the insurance marketplace, and boosting the market grip of AIG’s competitors.

That dynamic — how the collapse of AIG plays out on the street level — will likely be another major force in the independent agency system nationwide in 2009, and the foreseeable future.

Every year in insurance news springs surprises. Nobody would have imagined the AIG crisis until it happened. Surprises aside, it’s a sure bet that for this new year, among the most-read stories of 2009 will be ones involving the insurance giants Liberty Mutual and AIG and their ups-and downs.

Happy reading in 2009.