Moving away from jargon in business journalism

D.M. Levine of Adweek interviewed Fox Business Network senior vice president and anchor Neil Cavuto about its competition with CNBC.

Here is an excerpt:

What do you think about your competitors’ business coverage?
They can talk the talk, but they can’t walk the walk. If you’re going to be Bloomberg or CNBC and sponsor a presidential debate and you’re not even going to stay up late to give the Iowa caucus results or commit yourself nonstop to South Carolina or cover a debt downgrade post the market hours, either with the United States last summer or much of Europe, and still say you’re all business all the time, you’re lying through your teeth. We may be young and in half the homes and the upstart, but we know what we are.

What is that exactly?
I have a cardinal rule with my staff: We don’t use jargon. We don’t use acronyms. We don’t assume the audience has this down pat. We don’t try to check with our banker and broker contacts [to see] whether an interview impressed them. I’d sooner make an inroad with my mother-in-law. The rap against business journalists is that we deliberately try to sound like the smartest kid in the class. I can tell you, I was not. FBN is like a business field of dreams. If you build it, they will come. I’m not smart enough to know when they will come. I’m waiting. But I’m impressed by the results we’ve seen.

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