The problem with financial journalism

David Serchuk, a writer and journalist in Brooklyn who used to work for Forbes, writes for The Huffington Post about what he sees as the problem today in financial journalism.

Serchuk writes, “Here is my background. I worked in financial newsletters for two and a half years, was a reporter at a famed financial news mag for almost three years, was an editor at that same mag’s corresponding website for another two years and got laid off from there in late 2009. Not long after that I took a job writing a newsletter under the aegis of an extremely smart and successful trader. And I can honestly say I learned more about how to analyze a company within the first ten days of that job than I had learned in all my prior posts combined.

“Of course I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do that last job if I hadn’t had my prior experiences, but within a few hours of starting there my new boss told me about five or six different ways to analyze a firm’s financial statements that I hadn’t considered. Because now the exercise wasn’t merely academic, real money was at stake. And I learned more from simply being near a real trader than I had learned from other journalists in all those years.

“And this is a lot of my problem with financial journalism. When I watch the TV money shows I know that most of the anchors on these programs really don’t know what they’re talking about. They feed easy answers to their guests, and then let these same guests lead them around by the nose. They discuss their agreed upon talking points in a kind of kabuki ritual, and that’s that. Once you learn what to watch for you can see that so often they are doing little more than feeding the money beast.

“Here’s another secret, a huge percentage of the ‘financial’ writers I know don’t have all that much interest in business or finance. If they were really interested in business they would BE in business, making far more than the working-poverty wages at their high-profile, but largely underpaid, jobs. Many of us got into it because these were the places that needed people.”

Read more here.