Although my column appears every week in the Business Times section of the Sunday Times I can no more be described as a business journalist than Ismael Ayob can be described as an art expert. This doesn’t deter PRs from sending me the most tiresome press releases in the hope that we will be able to make space for the fascinating news that the new managing director of CrapCo Ltd has two children, a golf handicap of five, believes in spending quality time with his family when he isn’t being a workaholic, and loves reading military biographies.
So, although I am a de facto contributor to Business Times, I don’t actually share my colleagues’ fascination with all the tedious detail of the business world. In fact I find it all mind-numbingly boring and rarely read the financial pages these days. Which is odd if you think about it because I spent twenty-four years as a trader in financial markets and that solid grounding in the commercial world should, at least theoretically, make me a devoted reader. What’s gone wrong?
One possible explanation is that I’ve finally come to realise that pretty well everything that appears on the financial pages is information already in the public domain and can’t possible make me any money—.so why read it? Another is that I’ve become horribly cynical and am convinced that most of the articles that appear are little more than re-jigged press releases. With a few notable exceptions this seems to be the favoured route for business journalists. Instead of getting out onto the streets and yapping at the ankles of the corporate world many of today’s journalists prefer to sit at their desks checking their e.mail inboxes or waiting for the fax machine to splutter into action. When it comes to filling the blank space between the adverts (which is the real job of a journalist) it’s much simpler to wait for a company’s PR department to tell you what to write. Or perhaps it’s more sinister than that. Large corporates such as the financial institutions are huge newspaper advertisers and it takes a very brave editor to run a story exposing some skullduggery.
But the real problem, I suspect, is that the presentation of financial news has become so dreary that only those with a high threshold of boredom can cope with reading a business paper these days. Take the protracted battle between Harmony and Goldfields for example. Once you’ve grasped the salient details all you really need to know is who is going to win. The bickering between the two CEOs was occasionally worth a few column inches and yet this was generally accepted as one of the most challenging news stories of the year; challenging in the sense that even the most experienced journalist would have been hard pressed to keep the story alive. They certainly did their best though, with the result that both companies enjoyed disproportionate exposure.
Essential financial information is usually read by the people who matter on the news wires. The only reason financial publications still feel the need to tell most of us what we already know is that this is what they have always done and they can’t see why it should change. Part of the problem is the absurd notion that financial news should be taken seriously, both by those who produce it and those who read it. The dwindling sales figures for financial publications would seem to suggest otherwise. Factual accuracy may be absolutely essential when it comes to financial journalism but the unconvincing gravitas that frequently accompanies stories doesn’t fool anybody. If the financial papers lightened up a little they might stand a better chance of attracting new readers.