3

You Walk A Fine Line Between Celebration And Ruin

Journalists always know more about a story than they can write. Weirdly enough, in many cases, it's juicy stuff that an audience absolutely would want to read about, but we don't put it in the article. It sounds counterproductive, doesn't it? There are a bunch of reasons for this. These factoids might not have quite enough evidence to be able to prove in court, or maybe the writer has agreed not to use the info because the source they got it from is so good that they hope to get even better stuff from them at some point in the future. It's a constant process. "How much can I print? Can I definitely prove it? Is the story worth the potential outrage from sources?"

If you get this balance right, it can be one of the most rewarding parts of the job. A few years back, a company that is nearing Enron levels of sketchy in the way it moves money among its subsidiaries sent a very formal-sounding letter from their legal department to my then-editor to complain about a story that I was involved in which called them out on their financial wizardry bullshit. The place I was writing for put truth and accuracy in reporting above everything else -- which is unfortunately more than can be said for some UK publications, which have a habit of putting blatant racism and occasional Nazi-inspired headlines above everything else. This meant that the assertions made in my story, like every story, were checked and double-checked before hitting "publish." So when the fancy note came in with its posh letterhead and insinuations of legal action if we didn't play nice, there was only one thing we could possibly do: The other reporter on the story printed and framed it.

2

Sources Teach You A Funny Thing About Human Nature

Imagine you're a football coach and you've got a set of killer plays that you know are going to help you win big. Now imagine you call up a journalist and tell them, in highly specific detail, every single one of those plays. Now imagine the slapstick boing sound that will play when the camera pans onto you as your team limps home after a crushing defeat.

If you become a journalist, chances are you won't have to imagine a situation like that, because some sources fall head over tits to be that coach.

One time, a country in the Middle East was looking to raise billions of dollars. The whole way this works is through semi-secrecy. Until the last possible moment, no borrower country wants to let the people lending it money know exactly how much it wants, or how much it can afford to pay, or exactly when it will try to raise the money, because if it does, then the potential lenders will twist the screws to make sure they can get as big a return as possible.

This didn't stop one government official telling me, on condition of personal anonymity but well aware I had a duty to report what he said, exactly all of these details in the week before he was planning on asking for a huge amount of money. The financial markets reacted accordingly when the story was published, and the country had to cough up a few hundred thousand dollars extra each time it pays interest until the debt is gone.

In my old life as a general news reporter, I had a property developer tell me that he was trying to get planning permission to build a new bar in the middle of a residential district. People generally don't want to put their kids to sleep while listening to thumping bass and drunks puking in the parking lot, so when the story broke, they complained. A lot. As a result, the bar never happened. "I didn't think you were going to publish it!" the developer shouted down the phone at me -- having called me a day earlier, completely out of the blue and having never met me before, and having explicitly been told I would publish what he said.

1

You Have To Become An Immediate Expert In Anything

Just because you have a specialty doesn't mean you know absolutely everything there is to know about it, because I think that by that stage, journalists will have assumed their final form and become actual computers. Until the day of enlightenment promised to all reporters comes, journalists will do what everyone else does when they need to quickly brush up on something: They Google it.

This can take you to some odd places. As a rookie reporter, I got a call about a conference on the Nigerian gas and oil market that was happening right goddamn then. I shot over there, Googling everything I could about this market which I knew very little about. This was not enough to appease the ancient gods of journalism, though, who saw me trying to get a grip on a massive topic in a very short time span, and promptly gave me the finger. It turned out that I had misheard the heavily Nigerian-accented voice of the person who invited me on the phone, and the conference wasn't about gas and oil at all. It was actually about the Nigerian diaspora -- people who had moved away from the country.

Astute readers might notice that this has absolutely fuck all to do with finance, and I was now in my third hour out of the office in an early reporting job where I was desperate to impress my editor. But thanks to being an almost full-time denizen of the internet, my googling had given me enough information that I was able to ask one or two vaguely related, smart-sounding questions. In short, I blagged it. You need to get used to these sorts of blags, because they come up out of nowhere.

Sometimes, of course, this goes spectacularly badly, like when this junior reporter was certain that John Cusack was in American Beauty, even after he repeatedly told her that he wasn't. That video is a beautiful slow-motion car wreck. I wonder how I can relate it to finance?

Mike's Twitter is maybe the only place on the internet where dick jokes and finance collide.

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