Business aspects of news organisation

Based on the propaganda model, ownership and advertising are the elements of the media’s characteristics. For example, the business pages of Yorkshire Evening Post are financially supported by the Yorkshire Forward, the regional development agency. On the top of the page, there is a logo mark of Yorkshire Forward with the words “in association with”. Scott explains “it [Yorkshire Forward] has public money, but it is not run by government” and “they’re using money to support business growth, to support entrepreneurs, to promote Yorkshire internationally to attracting the investment”. He recognises “it’s good revenue for the newspaper and it helps to give a particular credibility to our pages as well that we have that sponsorship”. How does he keep the objectivity?

“The objectivity, that’s very difficult because we write a lot of things about Yorkshire Forward. But we will never not criticise them if we feel we are aware of criticism. The agreement is quite unbreakable. That sponsorship does not affect our journalistic independence anyway so I am quite to run stories about Yorkshire Forward doing good things but that is not because of they are sponsoring page, that’s because the stories worth it on news values”.

The owner of the Financial Times is Pearson. Bogler admits the importance of profitability as a news organisation. On the other hand, he emphasises “there is huge ‘Chinese Wall’ between the commercial side and the editorial side”. This means, there is “no interference” of the ownership or other sponsorship. Dawkins talks about this in detail.

“On the FT, our owner is Pearson, never intervened in what was written on the paper. It was completely unacceptable to do that. They were very good about it. They never did it. And there was a very clear division between the editorial department and the advertisement department. The editorial staffs were never told what the announcement is going in the paper on that day. They didn’t know who they were the advertisers”.

The Way to Avoid The Manipulation from The Sources

As the propaganda model shows, there are pressures to the media such as ownership, advertising, limited sources, flak, and anti-ideology. How do the business/financial journalists tackle to these pressures? The interviewees talk about the importance of education for journalists, judgement of news value through multiple news sources, transparent way of reporting, firm attitude toward the complaints, and codes of practice as self-regulation.

Education

Dawkins emphasises “it is critical that you are properly trained”. No education system may create the low quality of the reports which allows the key news sources and the intelligent readers to leave.

S) “The FT invests a huge amount of training. They sent me to business school in Insead in order to learn management. When I went to Japan, I stop to work four months to try to learn the language”.

I) To understand what they are talking about?

S)“Exactly. This is normal. They teach journalists accountancy, financial reporting, balance sheets. The FT puts a huge amount of money into training its journalists and raising their intellectual standard all the time because that is the future of their journalism”.

(S: Will Dawkins, I: the researcher)

Bogler also explains about the in-house training programs at the Financial Times:

“We have journalists teaching each other, so for example people teach classes. For example, I teach a class on valuation, sometimes how to value companies, you know, everything… how to value companies starting with dividends and P/E ratios do you know what I mean? Then going to more complicated things discount cash flow…or that’s it…how to see the cash flow, how to analyse the cash flow, how to do.., you know. And net present value. So I teach that sometimes, and I teach accounting and then many other of my colleagues teach these things. And then also, we have external trainers coming in, and teaching things”.

According to him, there are two recruitment programs which intend to obtain the experts. One is “graduate recruitment program”, to recruit the students in practical journalism course in university or media organisations and put them in the several sections at the Financial Times for two years. The other is the program to recruit the experienced persons in journalism or financial industries such as “an investment banker, an analyst, and fund manager”. These programs intend to set the intelligent level of the Financial Times high to be critical to business/financial issues.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14