Biz journalists becoming stars

Elizabeth Day of The Observer in London writes how many top business journalists have become well-known names by covering the financial crisis of the past four years.

Day writes, “For the first time in living memory, business correspondents are basking in the warm glow of the limelight. It is not just the hair dye. Every one of them I speak to recounts their own anecdote about the moment they realised their specialism had suddenly become cool. For Jeff Randall, the veteran business journalist and Sky News presenter, it was when cab drivers started asking ‘Hey Jeff, what’s going to happen to the markets?’ Randall laughs. ‘If I could tell you that, I wouldn’t be here,’ he jokes, sipping a cup of coffee on the top floor of the Gherkin building in London, overlooking an impressive sweep of the City. ‘I’d be out there, making a million.’

“For Gillian Tett, a regular television pundit and US managing editor of the Financial Times, it was winning a British Press Award for Journalist of the Year in 2009. ‘It was such a great shock,’ says Tett. ‘The idea that you’d give that award to someone like me, who was writing about complex finance, when usually it goes to someone for a big royal scoop. I was so convinced I didn’t stand a chance of winning, I’d actually contacted the babysitter to say I’d be back before the award was announced. It was so out of leftfield and I think it marked a real shift.’

“For Paul Mason, it was when he was first asked for his autograph. ‘It only happened last week,’ he says. ‘A man came up to me and asked for my autograph for his wife who is a sculptor in Devon.’ Mason sighs. ‘I’d rather be in obscurity, to be honest.’

“What has driven this upsurge in interest? There have, after all, been recessions and bank collapses before (albeit not on the same scale). But the current financial crisis seems to have captured the public imagination in a particularly potent fashion.”

Reads more here.