Covering Globalization: A Handbook for Reporters

At the Yokohama International Stadium in Japan, attended by 76,371 spectators, including his excellency the President of the Federation of International ‘ Football Associations, Joseph Sepp Blatter, an encounter took place today between the two successful semifinalists to determine the ultimate victor in the Fifa World Cup of 2002, which included 32 teams, fielding a total of 637 representatives of their nations in 96 matches over four weeks.

Why do we do that? Why do we think when we are reporting economics or business that we can forget the basics of our craft? We forget to put the news at the top of the story. We forget that our leads should not be cluttered with insignificant facts. We forget to keep it tight and tell it in plain language. Above all, we forget that while it might be about business or finance, it is still journalism.

There are, of course, many reasons. Probably the most important is that we do not know enough about the subject. So we depend on others—government officials and corporate communications departments—to tell us what the story is and to provide us with the terminology we need. When you hear an official talking about the central bank’s “net forward open position,” it is safer just to use the jargon than to get tangled up trying to find words that your readers can understand. And most of the time your boss or the copy editors on the desk are not going to yell across the newsroom at you, “Hey, Junior, what’s a net forward open position?” (It has to do with foreign exchange—although, talking about football, it sounds more like a good place for a goal scorer to be.) Our superiors hate to reveal their ignorance. So they too join the conspiracy that in the end leaves our readers in the dark.

Another reason we burden our stories with lots of numbers and technical language is that we think business readers are not like ordinary readers—they can take in lots of complex information, and they already know the jargon. Sometimes we want to show off to them or our colleagues, to be seen using big words. I once read a headline in a business newspaper that said: “ADR and GDR fungibility hinges on tax treatment.” (I swear I did not make that up.)

Most of the time, however, it is because it is a lonely life being a business reporter. You are left there with little guidance and even less sympathy, and you have to hack your way through stuff you have never heard of and produce enough stories to keep the desk quiet. Sometimes you wonder why you do it and look enviously across the room at the political reporters or the sports desk and dream about what it must be like to be part of the real world.

Well, don’t despair. This is the real world. If you have read the rest of this book, you will know by now, if you did not already, that the business and economics decisions we cover are matters of life and death. Only football reporters are able to claim with some justification that their subject is more important even than that.

Approached in the right way, we can make our subject so much more interesting and rewarding for ourselves and at the same time accessible and useful for our readers, who are not, incidentally, different from the readers of other sections. There is still the belief among too many financial journalists that their readers know what all the technical terms mean. They do not. Many readers buy and skim the financial press. And they skim it for news that directly affects what they do. The rest they leave unread, even if they have the time to read more. That is because while they might be highly paid experts in industry or government, they are only experts in one thing. A good accountant in the chemicals industry does not necessarily know anything about what is going on—or what the jargon is—in trade policy. A good agricultural economist does not necessarily know anything about how pension funds invest their money. And a good manager in the retail sector does not necessarily know how foreign exchange markets function.

Make the story your own. The biggest blight on business journalism is the habit of reporters relying on a single source for a story. Governments, companies, and nongovernmental organizations turn out a terrific number of press releases and other self-promoting material that end up in newspapers almost untouched by human hand. There is nothing satisfying in doing that. Instead, regard such information as the departure point only for what might become a story. Seek out other information, sources, and angles, and you will feel a greater sense of achievement. And when you get something that after further research and inquiry turns out to be old, boring, or inconsequential, have the courage to say, “This is not a story. I am not going to waste time with this.” And then get on with a real story.

Understand the subject better. This will bring the issues alive for you. If you find it dull and mysterious, it will come across that way to your readers. But as you begin to understand the dynamics of a market or the intrigues of a boardroom or the social consequences of an economic policy, so you will understand more about how life itself works. This will allow you to connect those things you might have thought were not part of the business universe—politics, education, crime and law, and the many things that can deliver well-being or suffering.

And explain it well. One of the great pleasures of the communication business is seeing people “get” something they had not understood before. (“Oh, now I see.”) If you are able to deliver that understanding to your readers, it can be immensely satisfying. That means you will have to develop a sense of when it is the reader needs help in understanding technical concepts and processes—and how to craft and polish the phrases that will provide that help.

Some of these things are difficult to do. There are many conservative and insecure bosses out there who will not like it when you tell them, “This is not a story.” Many of them got where they are by assuming that if it is in a press release or a government official said it, it must be news. Others just want to fill the pages and go home. Winning that fight will not be easy. But you are more likely to do so if you turn out quality journalism. So, let us look at some of the things we need to do to achieve that.

To start with, we have to go beyond the 5Ws and H. Most of us are familiar with the idea that our stories should answer the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How questions for our readers. We should continue to do so. But we have to go much further. We must first ask ourselves what it is about the thing that has happened that our readers need to know to judge its significance. We need to measure it. Is this the biggest or the longest or the highest? Is it 10 percent or 50 percent or double? Is this the first, the only, the last, or the final? The world’s biggest airline firing its chief executive is a much more important story than the fifth smallest airline firing a member of the cabin crew. Measure everything in the story—the companies, the people, the things that have happened—and give your readers a clear understanding of their scale. This in turn makes it possible for you to spell out the significance of the news.

FIFTEEN STATE FIRMS GO ON THE BLOCK

Fifteen state enterprises will list on the stock exchange in the next two years, boosting market capitalization by 803 billion baht, Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra said.

Three companies—Internet Thailand, Thai Airways International and the Petroleum Authority of Thailand—would list this year, with a value of 83.6 billion baht.

Krung Thai Bank, now over 90% government-owned, would also be divested to private investors.

Mr Thaksin said that in 2002, seven state enterprises would be listed, worth a total of 303.7 billion baht: the Telephone Organisation, the Communications Authority, the Thailand Tobacco Monopoly, the Airport Authority, the Government Housing Bank, the Port Authority, and the Government Savings Bank.

Five more would list in 2003, raising market capitalization by 309.9 billion baht: the Electricity Generating Authority, the Metropolitan Electricity Authority, the Provincial Electricity Authority, the Metropolitan Waterworks Authority and the Provincial Waterworks Authority.

“Privatisation doesn’t have to wait for the economy to improve. Once the state enterprises are ready, they can list,” Mr Thaksin said.

State enterprises would be grouped by sector under a new firm, the National Enterprise Holdings Co.

Finance Minister Somkid Jatusripitak said some agencies could list first, and sell shares to private investors later. Stock options would be offered to employees.

The stock exchange and the Securities and Exchange Commission would speed up listing procedures for state enterprises. Automatic listing approval would be given one year after agencies become public companies.

The government is to sell fifteen state-owned companies over the next two years in an attempt to boost the value of the stock market by more than a quarter in the hope that this will breathe life back into the economy.

By selling shares in Internet Thailand, Thai Airways International, the Petroleum Authority of Thailand, and twelve others, the government hopes to attract back the foreign investors who pushed the market’s value in the booming 1990s to more than twice what it is now.

The secret to getting to the essence of the story is to ignore for the time being all those details you get in company handouts—company names, the names of big shots in the company and their positions, advisers, bankers, product names, turnover figures, and all that. Make a statement with what you have left, in this case: “The government is going to sell some big companies to try to revive the stock market and the economy because both are pretty flat at the moment.” You can polish up the language and fill in the details later.

The next step in the thinking is to widen the story. This is where you make the story your own. You start asking questions that arise from the story, but which are not what this specific bit of information is about. The first thing is to take it beyond the specific person or company involved (or, if you are dealing with international economic news, the specific country).

When you have gone through the process of asking these “lateral” and other questions, then seek the answers. Do not think that you should know the answers yourself. This is where you begin asking the experts—using your journalistic expertise in asking questions. And the experts are, among others, the people who gave you the information in the first place, other companies in the same sector, stockbrokers’ analysts, academics, and bank economists, not forgetting your colleagues (such as the person who used to cover the news beat before you) and your news editor. And never forget the archives (which used to be a library, but is probably now some online database or even a general search on the Internet). Do that and you will not end up with a single-source story. In our example above, the sources are the prime minister and his finance minister—in effect, one source. Our readers have had no help in making a judgment about this decision—nothing from economists, foreign investors, domestic investment institutions. Do you know whether something like this has much chance of working? I do not.

Your next step is to decide what numbers you need. Often you will be given lots of numbers by the original news source—too many, but not the ones you need to do the “measuring.” You only want a few, but you want the ones that count, so to speak. And when you have decided which ones they are, make them reader-friendly. Do not say “32.79 percent of sales turnover” when you can say “a third.” Do not say “69.36 percent of the population” when you can say “seven out of ten.” If you look at our example again, the rewritten version tells us that the government is trying to “boost the value of the stock market by more than a quarter” and that the market’s value was “more than twice what it is now.” No need to use all those exact numbers at the top of the story.

Now you are ready to write. And the first question you have to decide on is what details you will need for the lead. You want to give the story real substance without cluttering the top with unnecessary details, numbers, or names, especially unfamiliar ones. In our original example above, the first paragraph is good in this respect, but very soon the story degenerates into a lifeless list of company names.

Next, either in the lead itself or soon after, tell the readers what the story means, why they are reading it. This is the help, the guidance, and the interpretation you offer to the busy reader who has all these questions churning around in his or her head but not enough time to put them in any order, let alone find out the answers. In our original example, there is nothing to help the reader. In the rewrite we say this is being done “in the hope that this will breathe life back into the economy.” That’s why we are giving you this story to read.

The so-what element, as this is often called, sometimes comes in the form of a paragraph that begins with a phrase such as “The decision underlines the government’s determination …” or The announcement signals a change of policy …” or “… underlines or highlights …” and so on. Try to get the essence of this into the lead and then fashion a coherent paragraph that spells it out further down the story. If you have made enough calls to the right people, you should have the material to work with on this vital part of the story.

Now, as your story unfolds, make sure you provide the necessary background and context. Many readers of a news story are new readers—ones who have just begun to venture into reading business news or have just come back from traveling abroad or from having a baby, or whatever. So you need to write your stories in such a way that they are accessible to everyone. Develop a sense of where readers might become puzzled or lost because they do not know what has gone before. The skill is to boil down the information you have gathered from the archives and from your reporting and that you carry around in your head into phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that “remind” readers of what has happened, dropped into the story as you go. Background is more of the formal “reminders” of what has happened, and context is the wider framework within which something is happening. Again, look at our example. There is no context or background. We do not know whether this is a surprise announcement (that’s a lot of privatization to come out with in one breath) or whether this has been long awaited. Nor are we told what has been going on in the stock market over the past few years or in the economy.

Next, make sure the story has life, and that means using direct quotes. These lend a sense of authenticity and actuality to what you write because quotes are the dialogue of real people in a nonfiction story. They change the pace and allow a story to be “heard” as well as read. They also capture things in everyday speech, which is often hard to convey in business.

And your final responsibility is to hold the reader’s hand through the technical bits. The difficulty is deciding what you have to explain and what is generally known and understood. This will vary from publication to publication, but in my experience, most financial journalists err on the wrong side—thinking they need explain less than they should.

Insert a crisp, clean, and clear definition at just that point in the story when you think readers are in danger of turning the page because they think they are running into alien territory and where their ignorance will make them feel either uncomfortable or irritated. What you are doing with this is signaling clearly to the readers that they do not have to know already what this thing means, especially when it is a new and difficult technical concept. Just stop the story and define it.

Rather than stopping the story and inserting a definition, use a phrase that defines the technical term as part of a sentence in the normal flow of reporting. So, instead of writing a new sentence after using the concept “trade deficit” that says, “A trade deficit is when a country imports more than it exports,” construct the whole thing in a way that makes it clear what a trade deficit is: “The trade deficit rose 65 percent to a record $271 billion in 1999 as the country’s strong economy pulled in foreign goods much faster than exports expanded.” The skill is to make the definition part of the information.

Use the technical term in a normal sentence, and then in the next sentence, use the defining phrase as an alternative while giving further information. For example: “Inflation was 6 percent in 1999. This is the first time the government’s measure of the change in prices for goods and services has exceeded 5 percent a year in the last decade.” Again, what you are doing here is still imparting new information or background rather than stopping the story while you give a definition.

Give a minilecture. Sometimes what the reader needs help with is not just a technical word but understanding a process. An example is when shares fall because of a threat of an interest-rate hike. Even this reasonably widely known process could do with some explaining—that “investors fear interest-rate rises because they dampen consumer demand for the products made by the companies they invest in and increase the burden of borrowing for those companies. So share prices fall as soon as the perception of a likely interest rate rise becomes widespread among investors.”

Writing clearly and simply is much harder to do than using a whole lot of technical terminology and making no effort to explain it. If you have the chance, get your hands on a copy of the Wall Street Journal, the biggest-selling serious business newspaper in the world. They write in a fresh and simple style, explaining things they think their readers will have difficulty with and always remembering that they have a duty to entertain as well as to inform. This is daily newspaper journalism, not writing for academic or trade journals, and it means that we should apply the same tests that any other journalist would apply: is it new, different, interesting, significant, or at times just entertaining? That’s our business.