More on The Accessibility Question

Felix Salmon has replied to my post Monday on the question of financial journalism's responsibility to make complex material accessible to a broad audience. Salmon, as usual, offers a reasoned response, though I think in some cases he's exaggerating what I actually wrote. My earlier post did not say that we had no responsibility to make material accessible, only that we tend to write for our core audiences, which in our case consists of financial professionals. On that score, it's far more important to write with sophistication than to try to simplify for a broad general audience.

Salmon makes it a little hard to tell whether he's talking specifically about us "trade" publications, financial journalism or financial blogging. I won't speak for any other publication, online or off, than The Deal.

That said we try to write as accessibly as possible across a broad number of related disciplines. I think that if Salmon had read us, particularly our magazine, The Deal, over the past six years or so, he would find any number of stories taking that "broad view" he seems to find synonymous with writing for a general audience. Did we fully capture what Salmon calls "the big picture"? No. But who did?

We did, however, touch on a number of subjects that later proved important. I've been going through our 2005 magazines this week for an anniversary issue in the fall and was frankly surprised by how relevant a number of columns, features and news analysis pieces turned out to be: We were skeptical about bank consolidation and the universal bank model, discussed the Fed's first fears about credit derivatives, raised questions about our ability to price risk (particularly in buyouts and M&A), tried to get clarity on the relation between stock prices and M&A success or failure. We also called the General Motors Corp. bankruptcy -- in 2005, mind you -- and raised questions over and over again about corporate governance, regulatory dysfunction and bubble forecasting.

Were there many stories we missed, either out of ignorance or because they weren't part of our mission? Absolutely. We lean toward advisers and investors, not traders (with the exception of risk arb); institutions, not consumers. We are not called The Deal for nothing. But I would also argue that many business and finance magazines have lost their way because they no longer know whom they're writing for or why.

The larger point here is not that we're so smart, it's that we tried to deal with subjects of broad interest -- true, not subprime -- in some depth. And while we know our core audience read us carefully, our discussion of M&A, say, or GM, rarely seeped into the outside world. Perhaps it was, as he broadly suggests, that we were simply offering up dry, lengthy "trade" material, leaning on PR people or writing too quickly. Well, everyone has an opinion. Our features do run up to 3,000 words, which in a bloggy world -- or among traders -- may seem long. But I don't agree that we wrote or edited too quickly; many of these features were worked over as heavily as anything in consumer magazines. And his shot about PR dependence is absurd and insulting. True, we do fill our pages with words (as does the notably successful Economist), often on subjects that general readers, particularly circa 2005, had no particular reason to care about.

Arguing against accessibility is like questioning Mom, the flag and apple pie. Accessibility is "good." Who can question that? But accessibility also exists in a tension with the demands of sophistication. Although I haven't seen his traffic reports, I suspect that much of Salmon's audience overlaps with ours. If he paused to define "collateralized debt obligations" or "alpha" every time he used the term, those readers would lose patience and drift away. If he started to write about electoral politics, say, or pop culture he would need to find a new audience. Increasingly, and this is part and parcel of the changes wrought by the Internet and blogging, we're all "trade," in some form or another. And in that narrowcasting world, the trade-off between accessibility and sophistication becomes more and more important.

• See Salmon's item from Reuters
• See earlier article from Dealscape

Robert Teitelman is the editor in chief of The Deal.

Comments

[RandVictims]

Capitalism is dead everywhere but China (coming soon...) though the establishment propagandists and opportunists can do everything short of facing the realization.

Unchecked/­supply-sid­e/Reaganom­ics is unsustainable in a true Democracy, that is so painfully clear it hurts to look at it. Eventually, even the silver-spoon academics and elitists most saturated in Stockholm Syndrome will question own their allegiance to the Rich Mans' order when the cancer of slavery approaches THEIR level of the pyramid.

Ayn Rand, Friedman, - all the Prophets-of-Profit whos ideals and mandates have ruled the planet with an iron fist since 1981 have finally been *publicly* exposed as merely snake-oil salesmen with an agenda to concentrate all the wealth from the many who produce the most to the few who produce the least.

So when status-quo, Wallstreet-bred financial pontificators ask themselves "Who do I write for?", - it should be clear that you are being prompted by your own conscience to take a side: Plutocracy or Democracy.

[WIpatriot]

Well stated, RV...I'm going to have to fan you.

Their decision is a simple choice, but the correct one requires them to give up the golden goose.

[IssuesInFocus]

Without levels of truth, "values" and transparency in business, capitalism already in a morbid state, dies. The question: Who is responsible? We know that answer, and it just hurts. The elephants walked the grass and crushed every blade of grass.
Sadly, just wringing our hands... is not a solution. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhwPssa8-sc

[larry278]

BTW, it's common knowledge that trust died on 9/15/08, a victim of the meltdown. Capitalism becomes very difficult, if not impossible, when there is no mutual trust among capitalists & those who benefit or suffer because of capatilist activity. Maybe if there were to transparency in financial journals & other sources of data on capitalism something which might resemble trust could be built or restored. Since that isn't going to happen, the current depression will be longer & deeper. How does one write regulations which insure transperency & truth in capitalism or socialism?