What's new?
What's the news?
Business is news. News is business.
Business is a vital part of the newsroom. Without it there wouldn’t be any newsroom. Without news, there wouldn’t be any business.
There is a direct, interactive and mutual relationship between news and business.
The world and money revolve on business. It is business that started civilizations and kept them going for centuries. It is business that kept small villages alive and thriving. It is business that keeps our country afloat in the sea of financial crises and economic disasters of our day.
Thus, business is of public interest. It is essential to the public. And the public must know.
It is the job of the business reporter to report and report and report on business. He must not do it in business fashion, but in laymen’s terms and in ways understood by all.
It is a challenge to journalists to write on business topics. Business reporting requires more than just the inverted pyramid and some interview quotes. It calls for math, an understanding of economics and finance, and a mind capable of handling numbers and money and all the necessary values in journalism.
It is a higher form of journalism, if it maybe termed as such, since it calls forth both the right and left hemispheres of the brain. Math is such a challenge for most journalists. Some would retreat at the sight of numbers. Some would scream. But for the brave few, they take the challenge and analyze the numbers and write it in a compelling way to get what the numbers are saying across to people. That is the challenge of business reporting—getting the numbers and analyzing them, and then tell the story they carry in words understandable by those who cannot read numbers.
For the brave few who do it, the economy of the country will always be grateful. Because of them, the nation knows what keeps it afloat in the sea of international debt, financial problems and poverty.
