Jaffe: Biz journalists need to use data with personal examples

Business journalists need to be able to decipher complicated data and be able to explain what that data means through the use of personal examples, a senior Marketwatch columnist said Wednesday night.

“Data driven reporting is quantitative and unemotional,” said Chuck Jaffe, who primarily writes about mutual funds. “Bringing it home gets the story out of data and into people. It doesn’t take long to find people who are affected.”

Jaffe was the keynote speaker Wednesday at the McGraw Hill Financial Data Awards Dinner in New York. The event was held by the International Center for Journalists, which offered an online financial data course this past fall. Journalists who took the course and wrote stories with data were honored at the dinner.

Jaffe said he still keeps a list of consumers who have contacted him about specific topics, and he relies on that list for examples when he is writing. He noted that a woman called him Wednesday to discuss gold who will likely end up in a future column.

“The more something [I write} is personal to someone, the more engaged they are,” said Jaffe, who recently used Reddit to find Bitcoin traders and shared those contacts with other Marketwatch journalists.

It’s often hard for business journalists to find the data that they need to tell a story, and when they do the data often does not tell the story that the journalist thought it would tell, said Jaffe.

“When the numbers come back, and they’re not what you thought, you have to ask, why not?” said Jaffe. And if the company or agency generating the numbers doesn’t know why the numbers are what they are, the reporter should dig deeper.

“Too many reporters are stopped by the word no,” said Jaffe. “The great thing about being a columnist is that I don’t have to be nice to the people I deal with.”

Jaffe provide other advice to the journalists at the dinner, including:

• Scams and frauds are often repeating themselves. Reporters should look for those. “There’s nothing new in scam world,” said Jaffe.
• Writing about investors who like or dislike a stock should dig deeper and explain the methodology for how that investor reached that conclusion.
• Don’t forget what’s important in life, added Jaffe. Money managers who complain to him that he’s ignoring an angle in a column often don’t understand what’s important to consumers.

Jaffe worked as a business journalist at the St. Petersburg Times, Allentown Morning Call and Boston Globe before joining Marketwatch. He is a past president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.