The deflation of business journalism

David Carr of The New York Times writes about how the field of business journalism has collapsed.

Carr writes, “There are several technical reasons underlying the collapse — and that’s what it is — of business journalism. Business wisdom that is imprisoned in printed pages, already locked in the past, increasingly seems like a curio. Who cares what happened yesterday or last week, when the fortunes of a stock can change in millisecond? Most business people already know what happened today, and what they really care about is tomorrow.

“Apart from the challenges of covering business in a digital age, the endemic categories of advertising including financial services, insurance and consulting services, and vaporized ad budgets from Detroit, have left once-fat chronicles of the business epoch bereft.

“But it isn’t just that Cadillacs aren’t selling like they used to. It’s also that the people who made them, bought them and drove them seem far more mortal and less interesting than they did just a few years ago.

“Business magazines used to relish explaining all the complex new financial instruments that Wall Street was using to pile up profits. But now it has become clear that the titans who were wielding those obscure tools had no idea what they were doing — even less an idea than the journalists in some cases.”

Read more here.