* Any views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author and not of Thomson Reuters Foundation.
It became apparent at the start of the second day this was going to be a very topical workshop. I asked the participants to name three things they'd done since we'd left each other on day one, the first reply rang out: "I sold my shares."
As I got my head around the situation in China, where I was running two consecutive financial and business journalism workshops in Beijing and Guangzhou, it became apparent the country was in the grasp of a stock market tumble. This made financial news front-page news; again. As we went forward, I also realised that several if not most of the attendees were stock market investors, showing how stock ownership has now penetrated China.
During the first workshop, a five-day one in Beijing at the campus of our partner, the Communication University of China, we adapted activities to examine how stock valuations work. We also looked at issues, in our ethics module, like conflicts of interest and explored whether it's a good idea for example for journalists to own shares in companies they write about.
During the second workshop, a three-day one, the stock market re-entered the room. As attendees told me at the start of day two what they'd done the previous evening, several of them turned out to have been working into the early hours of the morning covering moves by China's Central bank, the People’s Bank of China to inject cash into the stock market to break the fall. So we improvised a presentation on different central bank policy tools so that the reported could better understand and explain the action.
We reinforced the timeliness of the workshop during our session on the economic cycle. The previous day we'd spent time on story leads and discussed the nut graph: the all-important paragraph near the top of a story explaining to readers (and sometimes to reporters themselves) what's at stake in a story. We took the chance during the economic cycle to explain leading indicators, like the stock market. They tend to move before the economy.
"When the stock exchange index falls by a third, what is it really that has just disappeared?" I asked. "People's money," the reply. We discussed how this can then lead to a slowdown throughout the economy, and that's why it matters and why the Chinese government is trying so hard to stop it.
Finally, we focussed on showing not telling. Is it a big fall or a small fall? It's neither: it’s a 30 percent fall, but then the market is still up 83 percent over the precious year. As journalists our job is to show, not tell. Adjectives are our enemy, clear numbers our friends.
Finally, a question at the start of the Guangzhou workshop allowed us to make a final salient point. A participant had asked “how can financial reporters avoid intensifying investors’ panic when reporting (on) the (stock) index diving?” It was a good chance to make the point that this may not be the crux of the problem.
In fact, asking the right questions, holding to account and challenging companies during the good times, rather than letting them hype themselves into a bubble, may be the real responsibility of the good financial journalist.
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