I went to Cheltenham Literary Festival on Saturday to see Hugh Pym, Gillian Tett and Paul Mason give a talk about business journalism during the recession. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Paul Mason in particular as I think he’s really good at translating dense economics into manageable and interesting news stories, but all three were really impressive and very erudite speakers.
The thing that really jumped out at me was the difficulty they had, and still have, in getting people to listen to economics and financial stories pre-2007. More specifically, how hard it was to put certian topics on the agenda.
Paul referred to information ‘hidden in plain sight’ which seemed to be a theme in business reporting and Gillian talked about her tactics of looking for the most boring, least comprehensible nuggets of financial jargon in order to find the crux of a story. If the Thick of it has taught me anything, it’s that the most interesting policies come dressed in the most boring titles and this is clearly no different.
In learning about how to craft news stories we are always told that the best ones have events and human faces to pin them to. Gillian said this was the hardest aspect of writing about structured investment vehicles (sexy) and the pretty opaque fluctuations of the debt and credit markets in 2004-7.
Now we have bankers as the human face of the crisis but before the bubble burst, there was barely any coverage of certain aspects of the financial system. Gillian Tett in particular seemed really concerned that stories of real importance were getting through to the public which is tough, when it takes more than 140 characters to explain credit swaps and defaults...
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