Making biz news accessible

Robert Teitelman, the editor of TheDeal.com, and Reuters blogger Felix Salmon have been having a discussion about the need for business journalists to make their stories more accessible.

Here is an excerpt from the latest from Teitelman:

“Were there many stories we missed, either out of ignorance or because they weren’t part of our mission? Absolutely. We lean toward advisers and investors, not traders (with the exception of risk arb); institutions, not consumers. We are not called ‘The Deal’ for nothing. But I would also argue that many business and finance magazines have lost their way because they no longer know whom they’re writing for or why.

“The larger point here is not that we’re so smart, it’s that we tried to deal with subjects of broad interest — true, not subprime — in some depth. And while we know our core audience read us carefully, our discussion of M&A, say, or GM, rarely seeped into the outside world. Perhaps it was, as he broadly suggests, that we were simply offering up dry, lengthy ‘trade’ material, leaning on PR people or writing too quickly. Well, everyone has an opinion. Our features do run up to 3,000 words, which in a bloggy world — or among traders — may seem long.

“But I don’t agree that we wrote or edited too quickly; many of these features were worked over as heavily as anything in consumer magazines. And his shot about PR dependence is absurd and insulting. True, we do fill our pages with words (as does the notably successful Economist), often on subjects that general readers, particularly circa 2005, had no particular reason to care about.

“Arguing against accessibility is like questioning Mom, the flag and apple pie. Accessibility is ‘good.’ Who can question that? But accessibility also exists in a tension with the demands of sophistication. Although I haven’t seen his traffic reports, I suspect that much of Salmon’s audience overlaps with ours. If he paused to define ‘collateralized debt obligations’ or ‘alpha’ every time he used the term, those readers would lose patience and drift away.”

Read more here.Â