 4/10 Good --- blogs.afp.com http://blogs.afp.com/?feed/rss2
Tuesday, October 07, 2008 --- 58 days ago http://blogs.afp.com/?post/2008/10/06/Wanted%3A-an-interest-in-the-business-worl
 Even for the most innumerate among us, it must be pretty clear today. Just four weeks and a day from the US elections, and with bomb blasts and earthquakes in the news alongside the start of the Nobel prize-giving season, it is the crisis shaking the world's financial markets that dominates the news, as it has done for weeks. 'It's the economy, stupid' is a phrase confined no longer to the realms of US politics. Instead, it extends into almost every corner of the newsroom. Sports these days is often a business, no? Interested in African news? When I lived in Africa, African newspaper editors told me they wanted 'more on the economy' and less on the 'old topics' of African news: disease and war. So, as this article about the media in Britain points out, now is a good time to be a business journalist. Or perhaps it always was, and not just in London. I spent a couple of years, early on in my career at AFP, reporting business news and know that it is often seen in many news organisations as an esoteric field, of no interest to most. But business stories that are properly written do interest the average reader. 'Don't these people realise that if or when they fill up their car, pay their rent or mortgage, put money in the bank, or put money aside for their children they are affected by the business world, like it or loathe it' one economic editor, who should remain nameless, harrumphed to me one day, railing against number-shy colleagues ... |
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