Memoirs of a markets reporter

Chao Deng, who covers the markets for TheStreet.com, writes Monday for Columbia Journalism Review about the experience.

Deng writes, “I wanted a beat with broader appeal. And sure enough, less than three months after the switch, page-views on my stories were soaring. My new-found popularity wasn’t because I had suddenly became a brilliant writer. It was because a volatile turn in the markets simply begged for an explanation, sending thousands of extra readers my way.

“At about the same time, though, the drudgery of writing the market-close story — stocks up on this; stocks down on that — began to make me wonder whether chasing the inevitable day-to-day ups and downs of markets was worth anyone’s time. Some critics say markets reporters must suffer from A.D.D., because short-term fluctuations in stock indices really don’t matter much in the long run. They say it’s absurd to pin a single narrative on spot news involving countless individual decisions, many of them made by robots. Too often, coverage favors one slant if stocks are up and another if stocks are down when, in fact, nobody really knows.

“And yet, the bigger the swing in the Dow, the more urgent the need to chase down an explanation, even if it’s a short-term one. Indeed, larger swings actually predict greater reader interest, which, in turn, validates the coverage.

“The public understands that something is a bit off-kilter, as we see frequently in reader comments on our daily market stories.”

Read more here.