We got down to business reporting in this week’s L2 Specialist Journalism seminar.
It was a good discussion. The students got to grips well with the main topics – how business stories should be told, and the myths surrounding business leaders (Jobs a good ‘un vs Big Bad Billy Gates).
The group excels at focusing on the nuts and bolts of crafting stories to deadline, and with reader-appeal, and then looking at what this means for depicting complexity and nuance.
But then we went off at an interesting tangent.
One of the stories that came up for discussion was about high profits declared by a UK energy company.
You can fuel some of the people all of the time..
To personalise the story,someone suggested hooking it up to a piece about old people who had died because they couldn’t afford to heat their homes over the winter.
And all of the people some of the time…
What struck me was that they thought the connection between these two things – so-called fuel poverty and high profits – was obvious – though no-one could quite explain what it was.
But you can’t fuel all of the people all of the time
There is no connection, of course. If there were, lower profits would mean fewer deaths, and no profits would mean no deaths, which makes no sense.
The group wasn’t entirely convinced, though. The thing was, some remained very suspicious of the profit motive – even though it’s the pull of the profit motive that keeps us in iPads and fresh bread.
Reading unlist
So clearly, someone has to fly the flag for profit. It needs all the friends it can get right now.
How to get the message across? I’d suggest the following off-list material:
- First stop: the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith. (There’s even a free PDF.)
- Then there’s this video, where Milton Friedman tells the story of the pencil.
- And – best of all as an intro: How an Economy Grows and Why It Crashes, by Peter D. Schiff and Andrew J. Schiff.
The Schiff book is a readable, entertaining, and very convincing explanation of how markets work.
Or would work if they were left alone.
Moral
And the moral is:
A profit is not without honour in my seminar group.