Categories: OLD Media Moves

Where do we go from here?

Mark Gay of the Moscow News writes Friday about how financial journalism needs to be covered more widely and by more journalists.

Gay writes, “As CNBC’s first bonds analyst, I stood on the trading floor of a derivatives exchange, explaining how low interest rates were creating ‘irrational exuberance,’ in Alan Greenspan’s words.

“For a brief moment, television was staring at the beating heart of the financial system.

“Soon CNBC was back to touting shares, with one part criticism, four parts cheerleading.

“As the dot-com bubble inflated in the late 1990s, the banks grew rich on IPOs. Insiders got free shares in companies sold to a misinformed public.

“TMT was the buzzword: tech, media and telecoms. I told my Reuters editor we should avoid this salesman’s talk and choose our own language.

“I lost another argument. Within a year, many TMTs joined the 90 percent club: companies that shed nine-tenths of their stock market value.”

Read more 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.