Categories: OLD Media Moves

Biz journalists want to write exclusive stories, not just disseminate: Study

Business journalists prefer to write articles with exclusive content that comes from sources inside companies rather than simply disseminating information that companies provide to everyone, according to research released this week.

Four business school professors — Andrew C. Call, Scott A. Emett and Eldar Maksymov of Arizona State University and Nathan Y. Sharp of Texas A&M University — surveyed 462 business journalists to gain insights into their reporting and discovered three themes.

Those themes are:

Financial journalists have stronger incentives to produce original information and analysis than to disseminate information already in the public domain, and they rely heavily on private communication with company executives for information;
Sell-side analysts play an important role in informing financial journalists, particularly those who lack financial sophistication; and
Business journalists feel “substantial” pressure to maintain cordial relationships with companies and are often cut off when they write negative stories.

More than 60 percent of the respondents to the survey have worked at least 10 years in financial journalism, and more than 70 percent work at The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Bloomberg News, Associated press, Forbes, The New York Times, Reuters and The Washington Post.

Almost 80 percent of the business journalists said that writing articles with exclusive content was very important to their job performance, and more than 60 percent said that they are very likely to have private phone calls with company management when reporting an article.

The results also found that business journalists place more emphasis on accurate, timely and in-depth reporting than the number of people who read their articles.

Almost 22 percent said that they are very likely to lose access to company management after writing an unfavorable article about the company, and more than half said they are contacted by media relations management after publishing an unfavorable article.

To read the entire study, go here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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Biff BiffStein says:
November 9, 2018 at 12:31 pm
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