Online Journalism News

'Recession and the new financial media'

Adrian Lowery, assistant editor of thisismoney.co.uk, looks back at a year of financial turmoil that saw visitors to the site surge 60 per cent, hitting a peak of 1.7 million in October; and forward to the challenges financial journalists face as recession beckons:

The last time there was a recession in Britain, in the early 1990s, people didn't have the internet. They couldn't bring up breaking economic news on their screen at work, look up how fast their house was losing value or search for jobs at the stroke of a mouse. Email was a novelty.

Moreover, not long ago a good many well-educated citizens would have been happily ignorant of the whys and wherefores of, say, interest rates; now statements from Bank of England deputies are front-page news and top traffic winners. Even 'Libor' has entered the mainstream news vocabulary.

As we enter the first economic slump of the digital age, a post-mortem is taking place on the credit with which news providers and journalists, in all media, have emerged from the spectacular financial storm of 2008.

A Treasury Committee inquiry into the banking crisis will soon meditate on whether the media had a role in destabilizing financial markets last year.

I'd suggest it wasn't a case of 'too much information' or the odd sensationalist headline that brought the markets down. The real imbalance was in two massive information deficits: that between what banking chiefs knew and what their whizz-kids knew (or didn't); and that between the protagonists of the financial world and a public with its livelihood and pensions tied up in it.

With limited headline space, the financial argot can become restricted: there is lots of turmoil and crisis and crashing going on – but the readers know a real crisis when they see one, as the response of web traffic to the collapse of Bear Stearns at first and Lehman Bros afterwards indicated. People – never mind markets – are used to reading between lines of hyperbole.

Online the pressure to optimize for Google might prevail against overly excitable headlines anyway.

An obvious characteristic of financial coverage in the last year has been the so-called 'attention cascade': as we enter recession, news editors leap eagerly on each retailer in administration, each set of repossession figures and poor house price data.

The result is a fuzz of news static, almost all of it 'bad' and undifferentiated by any sense of proportionality. A more discerning approach to news-editing and copy-tasting is perhaps required.

But even if the media didn't cause it, we certainly didn't call it. If the reader comments at This is Money are anything to go by, there's been a tangible backlash against not so much journalists, but 'experts', 'analysts' and 'economists' and a greater skepticism as to why the news media routinely carries articles based around their predictions and opinions.

You get the feeling that readers would rather journalists stick their own necks out than hang pieces on a quote. Experts and analysts doubtless have a future in financial journalism, but perhaps more in the way of horseracing tipsters: widely consulted out of curiosity, but taken with a pinch of salt by the punter who's prepared to read his own form.

This is Money ran a piece sticking its neck out on Kaupthing Edge in February last year, advising that savers limit their deposits with that bank and warning of the dangers for UK savers of a collapse in the Icelandic banking system.

But we didn't go so far as to remove the Kaupthing and Icesave accounts from our best-buy tables: if you present information clearly, in proportion to its significance and relevance, readers must make their own calls – in this case based on their attitude to risk.

A substantial new readership will follow the recession online this year and next. There is a challenge in retaining as many as possible of last year's huge spike in financial news readers, but also in catering to those who are increasingly coming to us for advice on debt, redundancy and money-saving.

To whit, we've been developing a range of 'splash pages', or one-stop shops if you like, centred on particular key subjects. Our page on interest rates has been a particular success, bringing together relevant content from across the site along with some editorial comment, calculators and deal finders.

Rather than being sent backwards and forwards by each news angle on the economy, readers can get to the nub of the subject swiftly, read around it if they wish and access advice relevant to the subject.

A seasoned old hack in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop advises the green hero William Boot that 'News is what a chap who doesn't care much about anything wants to read. And it's only news until he's read it. After that it's dead.'

As the digital age renders this rather brutal assessment perhaps truer than ever, maybe it can also inject financial journalism with some new life.

For the latest financial news, data, advice and deals, visit www.thisismoney.co.uk.

Tags (click tag to find related articles; click icon for feed):
comment | adrian lowery | thisismoney |

Sign up here for our free, daily email newsletter to get all the latest stories, jobs, tips and more.

Got a story? Email our news team: Laura Oliver; Judith Townend or telephone +44 (0)1273 384290. You can also follow us on Twitter: @journalismnews / @LauraOliver / @JTownend.