business journalism


Getting downto b R


Stefan Stern considers the challenges and opportunities for the City pages and beyond


eporters do not usually like becoming the story. But at the end of July we got a rare insight into the sometimes chaotic world of high-powered deal-making, courtesy of the Twitter accounts of several Financial Times


journalists. Speculation had grown over previous days, thanks to a story on the Bloomberg newswire, that Pearson, the long-standing owner of the FT, was close to a sale. The story was ridiculed by many, who were used to seeing other papers running with unsourced rumours about Pearson and the FT. But that Thursday morning there really was news – at


least, it looked like it. Axel Springer, the German media group, owner of Bild and Die Welt, was going to get its hands on the FT. Staff at the paper started making jokes about learning German (disclosure: I was on the staff there until 2010 and still write for them.). Axel Springer started “trending” on Twitter. Except that... the story was wrong. Just after lunchtime the real story emerged: Nikkei, the Japanese financial publisher, was buying the FT for £844 million. Chuck out the German phrasebook, and take a bow to the east. A rapidly assembled meeting at the FT’s Southwark bridge headquarters saw the Pearson chief executive, John Fallon, and FT group CEO, John Ridding, explain what the deal would mean. FT staff, including NUJ FoC Steve Bird, asked some good questions, as you would have expected them to do. And meanwhile the FT’s own reporters got to work uncovering the fast-moving details of the deal, which had only been sealed at the last minute when the Nikkei people had upped their offer by around £100 million. Here was proof, if any were needed, that global business journalism is a hot commodity. These stories move fast. Only two weeks earlier there had been another striking example of what business journalism can do. On July 14 a fake Bloomberg wire story concerning a fictitious plan to buy Twitter was posted and disseminated (via Twitter, naturally). This happened at 11.36 in the morning New York time. Twitter’s share price “spiked” upwards by more than eight per cent.


12 | theJournalist


A spokesman for Bloomberg quickly tweeted that the apparent story was in fact a quite well-executed hoax, published on a lookalike (but bogus) “Bloomberg” web site. By 11.50am Twitter’s shares were back to their earlier pre- hoax price. But in the meantime, anyone managing to trade Twitter stock could have made a handy $2 a share. And if you had placed a big buy and subsequent sell order at the right time, well ..... do the math, as they say on Wall Street. There is a reason why some stories are called “market


movers”. But today, with the spread of blogs, online news sites as well as the live coverage provided by mainstream media, there is more business noise out there than ever before. In a still nervous post-financial crisis world, getting a tiny piece of (true!) information a few seconds ahead of everybody else could be valuable. “An exclusive news story on our live blog could make our readers money,” says Andrew Clark, deputy business editor at The Times. As in other areas, technological change has forced business


journalism to adapt. But it is possible that business coverage has changed more than many other categories. Some of the clichés about the old world were true. City pages were steady, at times even rather leisurely sections for some of the time. Pre “Big Bang” (1986) and the emergence of global markets that are interacting almost non-stop, the day’s trading was a bit more predictable, with its own familiar rhythm. “I think that business sections are far better than they were


20 years ago,” The Times’ Clark says. “There used to be these long stories about company reports, but they could be a bit dull. The demand from investors has changed – they don’t want tedious write-ups. You can’t produce a paper that tells you about things that happened yesterday which you already knew about,” he says. From early stock market announcements at 7am through


to Wall Street closing at 10pm UK time, with Asia opening up shortly afterwards, business news hardly sleeps. The BBC, once criticised (not least by its former business editor,


Jeff Randall) for being too slow and even “anti-business”, now gives over a generous 15 minutes of airtime on Radio 4’s Today programme at 6.15 to cover business stories and interview market players. For the Financial Times this is naturally an energising moment – and not just because it is about to have a new owner. After a false start with the first iteration of ft.com over a decade ago, the FT’s online operation has grown in strength. While sales figures


STEVE NICHOLS/ALAMY

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