How social media has changed the perception of financial media

John Authers, who is leaving the Financial Times to join Bloomberg News later this month, writes in his last FT article about how social media has changed consumer’s perceptions of financial media.

Authers writes, “By 2010, social media was a fact of life. Writing on Twitter, journalists’ social network of choice, became part of the job. People expected us to interact with them. This sounds good. We were transparent and interactive in a way we had not been before. But it became part of my job to get into arguments with strangers, who stayed anonymous, in a 140-character medium that made the expression of any nuance impossible.

“Meanwhile, the FT hosted social media of its own. Audience engagement became a buzzword. If readers commented, we talked back. Starting in 2012, I started debating with readers and I learnt a lot. FT readers are often specialists, and they helped me understand some arcane subject matter. Once, an intense discussion with well over a hundred entries on the subject of cyclically adjusted price/earnings multiples (don’t ask) yielded all the research I needed to write a long feature.

“Now, following Twitter, comments below the line are degenerating into a cesspit of anger and disinformation. Where once I debated with specialists, now I referee nasty political arguments or take the abuse myself. The status of the FT and its competitors in the financial media as institutions entrusted with the task of giving people a sound version of the truth now appears, to many, to be totally out of date.”

Read more here.