New approach needed to address 'endemic conflicts' of interest in financial journalism, say experts

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A new approach is needed in financial journalism, a discussion group of experts from the financial journalism, PR and business sectors agreed today. According to a new POLIS publication authored by Damian Tambini, financial journalists must 'urgently seek to reassess their roles and responsibilities and seek a new regulatory settlement'.

The report, which was researched before and during the current economic crisis, suggests that a new model for financial journalism is required to respond to market and technological changes.

The research, which involved talking to 25 seminar attendees and 24 high profile interviewees, suggested that financial journalists differed in how they saw their role: some seeing it as a public service, others as a responsibility to the market, said Tambini, who added that the definition of a financial journalist was increasingly hazy.

He said that the factors affecting the current approach to financial journalism include: the increasing speed with which journalists are expected to publish at the detriment of the verification process; the difficulties of sustainability 'where every cost has to be justified in a vigorous way'; and globalisation where it could be more difficult to identify a 'public interest' when the 'national interest' is less clear.

In addition there are 'endemic conflicts of interests' for financial journalists brought about by new media, source dependency, advertising conflicts, and a pressure to respond to public taste, said Edward Wasserman, the Knight Professor of Journalism Ethics at Washington and Lee University, who also spoke at the launch of the publication at the London School of Economics (LSE) on Monday morning.

For all journalists regular and specialised 'beats' can be 'toxic to independence', while financial journalists need to make sure they avoid the 'constitutionalised concealment' that has defined journalism and its relationship to PR and sources in the past, said Wasserman.

The role of public relation companies currently makes the work of financial journalists 'very difficult', agreed Tambini.

Furthermore it 'should be a cardinal rule for a journalist not to write about a company they don't fully understand' and editors should ask journalists to explain what they are writing about companies, Wasserman added.

Journalists should strive to 'break free of the accepted state of discourse' and serve the public, but not pander to them, he said.

The rise of citizen journalism has created additional problems for financial journalists, as new employment models are adopted involving 'serial moonlighters' - those who might be copywriters by day and journalists by night, said Wasserman, who criticised CNN for disassociating itself from the piece of citizen journalism on Steve Jobs's heart attack , which came under its brand name.

As a result of these factors, the role of financial journalists will change in the future, with more emphasis placed on commentary and analysis in addition to reporting, Charlie Beckett, director of POLIS told Journalism.co.uk.

"Journalists have always made judgement calls; have always decided this is the story, this is not, so I have no problem whatsoever with them taking on the role of a guide," he said.

"If they are from a strong, branded editorial community like the FT, like the BBC, that's great because they have a reason to protect their reputation. Those organisations have to keep thinking about what makes their reputation? How do they attend to their independence?," he said.