A note to journos

I'm now judging journalism awards, which is a new way to consider the value journalists bring.

My days of winning plaques for journalism are behind me: I’ve graduated to judging. Today, we celebrated the State Street Institutional Press Awards in Asia Pacific. Here’s what I think about how reporters add value.

The internet has reduced a lot of our work to ‘content’ or blips in someone’s market-sentiment data model. But this doesn’t make good journalism less relevant. On the contrary, the good stuff – original, accurate, neutral, independent – is increasingly valuable amid all the noise.

Most reporters, particularly in the finance trades where I live, do not add value. The good news for those with some ambition is that there’s space for them to make their mark. Building domain knowledge takes time when you’re not a practitioner. But such knowledge makes a reporter valuable to their audience.

Reporters need to get out of the office, get off their screens, and speak with sources, as often as possible. Even ‘data journalists’ need to speak with industry experts to put their stats into context. Good stories are about human decisions, so interacting with other people is essential. If your editor doesn’t encourage this, or keeps people chained to an output machine, it’s time to look around.

Editors are the unsung heroes behind award-winning stories. Reading the entries, I have a hunch about which ones were well edited. It’s not just a smoother read. Editors provide feedback and help train reporters to think critically, to ask better questions, and to find corroborating sources. That’s the path to domain knowledge. Reporters thinking about their career paths should value the editor as much as the company brand: in what environment are you going to learn the most?

This is how reporters can work towards ensuring their output is worth someone’s subscription fee. It’s how they can build a personal brand that becomes monetizable, either by their media operator, or by themselves. In a semi-creative knowledge business, learning, building domain expertise, and original and quality output are linked. And those lead to financial support.

It’s easy to lambast “the media” because too few reporters practice these values or are given the chance to do so. News is a commodity. Insight from talking to the right people and honing that into your narrative is a skill.

This year, we awarded Lulu Chen of Bloomberg for ‘outstanding achievement’ to the industry. She came to the judges’ attention last year for both her daily reporting as well as for her book on Tencent, Influence Empire.

This is what I’m talking about: a reporter who knows her stuff and has built a network, to the extent that she is a domain expert and can write a book that industry practitioners find valuable. I’m not saying every reporter has to write a book, but…actually I am saying something close. Writing a book is not for everyone and it’s wrong to conflate it with a successful career in journalism, but any reporter worth their salt should have developed the expertise to be able to do so.

It’s no surprise that the entries we judged were long-form articles. This medium is supposedly dead, but a well-written, well-reported long article will provide tremendous value to the relevant people, the people who care – the people you want to reach and influence. I love doing my DigFin VOX video podcasts and banging out the odd opinion on LinkedIn. But those aren’t what establish my knowledge or my street cred: those are the forms that I use to monetize and to amplify what I’ve learned.

Reporters should make sure they still have opportunities to take deep dives into their beats. Again, that sourcing, organizing and honing into a narrative is the learning that makes a reporter’s work valuable – and ultimately makes their brand marketable.

AI is a threat to many media companies. I use LLMs for day-to-day research. I don’t use AI to write. I’ve tried (I am lazy and would love to fob off some of the work to a computer). But the outputs are never sufficient, they’re bland, they’re sometimes hilariously wrong. Worst of all, though, I learn nothing. It’s like robbing my own future.

Sadly, there remain many media operators that seem happy mass-producing slush. These places will not survive, but they will also crush the opportunity out of anyone trying to be a reporter there.

For a while, the listicle-led eyeballs model seemed to work at scale, but that game is now over. Publishers paying OpenAI a fee to get a slice of ChatGPT output are digging their own grave. Readers will increasingly source information from LLMs without visiting the sites being referenced.

LLMs can help with research, and they can help non-native English speakers with writing, but they can’t replace your time speaking with sources, taking notes, and forging that into your story.

For media operators, surviving AI requires a doubling down on useful, must-read content, stuff that won’t show up in an LLM search. That means they are going to need some damn good reporters. The internet and now AI continues to bifurcate our industry, with the mediocre majority losing all pricing power and a surviving elite of people and brands that are even more useful to their readers, because of their originality and their informed analysis.

I’m writing this to encourage younger reporters to think about their career path now that AI is taking a machine gun to traditional business models, especially in content. Who’s their editor, how are they engaging with sources, what chances do they have to do tougher projects, and most of all, how and what are you learning? Are you able to cohere that into Lulu-level book writing, or something equally ambitious? What’s it going to take to get to the point where you are regarded as an expert in your chosen beat?

Finally, I’d like to thank State Street for continuing to support these awards. They are the only ones in APAC for business journalism. It’s not easy to achieve dignity in this job, but these awards confer some, and bring some bragging rights, and that’s important. State Street has no role in the judging and the articles we review as judges are anonymized.