FT reporter: Biz reporting is “people making mistakes and errors and strokes of genius”

Tyler Rothmar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Japan profiles Leo Lewis, a Financial Times correspondent in Tokyo.

Rothmar writes, “Although he writes on a variety of topics, financial journalism is closest to his heart. ‘When it’s done well,’ he says, ‘you overlay a narrative and treat it as any other kind of journalism, in that you’re telling a story. The numbers are there as props and background, because at heart, you’ve got people making mistakes and errors and strokes of genius. There are petty arguments and big discussions about strategy and little ones about where to have the coffee machine. That’s business, whether it’s Google or a tiny Japanese construction company. It’s a series of stories.’

“Lewis spent seven years from 2003 in Tokyo reporting for the Times before moving to Beijing in late 2010. He uses the word ‘brilliant’ to describe his time there as bureau chief until April 2015, and likens it to being in the U.S. during the formative 1920s.

“The breakneck speed of change, he says, was such that a massive cohort of newly white-collar Chinese were the first of their lines to buy cars, and did so almost simultaneously, meaning the rules, etiquette and future norms of the road were being formed before his eyes. ‘I don’t like to use the word, and it’s a shame there aren’t more synonyms, but I was using ‘unprecedented’ in copy all the time, because it really was,’ he remembers.”

Read more here.