Style drift in business journalism

Seen any style drift lately? Yes you have. And you’re likely to see more.

Style drift? It’s the term that applies when a business news service covers a story that isn’t really business news.

Remember that white dress/blue dress debate? All the biz majors – text, digital, and TV — were on top of that story. Yet it had nothing to do with the dollars and cents of the world.

Sure, there were those who tried to pretzel a business angle onto it (what’s happening with sales of this kind of dress?). Others tried to imply the debate had consequences or lessons for the business world.

Bunk. It was a fun story that everyone was talking about and everyone wanted to cover, regardless of what their respective news institutions are supposed to be about. You see the same phenomenon with major sports or entertainment developments.

This isn’t to say there aren’t cases where a business news take isn’t appropriate for some general news event. Teasing out the money implications out of world developments is a major part of the business news mission. Indeed, many audiences prefer looking at news through the business lens.

But sometimes it’s just an interesting news ride reporters and editors want to throw their saddle on.

And it’s been exacerbated by the click. News is for the most part a volume business. The advent of the digital world simply allows for better and quicker measurement. So you can immediately identify a hot story. And there’s an immediate profit motive to lean toward it, regardless of whether it’s part of your normal knitting or not.

Folks at Wharton recently took a look at this behavior in the study: “How Much Is Web Traffic Changing the News You Read?” Their conclusion was it happens more with hard news than soft stories (kind of surprising, given various Kardashian headline binges, no?).

But the researchers didn’t look specifically at business news. And there the additional symptom of the click-hunger is to cover juicy, populist, non-business stories. Sure, there will be attempts to twist a business angle onto the subject. But at the end of the day, a celebrity scandal is still a celebrity scandal.

And it pays off, particularly as audiences become more about news feeds and search. Readers are more interested in the immediacy of news and content, not who told them; if the news about the winner of the U.S. Open came from a sports site or business site, so what? (And frankly, sometimes the business news outfits are better at it).

And so we’re likely to see more and more style drift in the business news world. Ironic, since biz news is the first to castigate a mutual fund or bank that bulks up its portfolio by straying from its stated investment style. But you go with what works, right?

Allen Wastler is the former managing editor of CNBC.com and the former managing editor of CNNMoney.com. He can be reached at awastler@gmail.com.