CJR EIC Pope: Davos shows we need to fix business journalism

Columbia Journalism Review editor in chief Kyle Pope writes about the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland and what it says about business journalism.

Pope writes, “I attended Davos once, on the eve of the subprime crash, when I was a senior editor at Condé Nast’s Portfolio, a glossy magazine that covered global business. The magazine died when the economy tanked. Before that, I spent a decade at the Wall Street Journal. I both hated and wallowed in Davos as much as anyone.

“But it’s gotten to the point where none of this is funny anymore. Never in my career have I seen such a disconnect between the state of the global economy and the stories that the business press is serving up to cover it. The colossal, historic scale of income inequality; the global economic dislocation brought about by the climate crisis and deindustrialization; the quiet, painful struggles of families unable to keep up with debt and inflation. These are dark times, too, for our global workplace, but they do not make up most of what continues to pass for business news.

“Perhaps we need to rethink the very notion of business journalism. Why does it need to be siloed from national and political reporting? Why does it continue to revolve around CEOs and their press machines, rather than the workers and customers who should be at the heart of the story? Why does the skepticism the press applies to politicians not always seem to apply to the broader global elite?”

Read more here.