Journalists sometimes feel aggrieved when they come in for criticism that implies they do not measure up to some previous golden age of reporting. I've been an adjudicator for the Sanlam Awards for Excellence in Financial Journalism since 2002 and almost every year someone asks me whether the standard of financial journalism has improved or declined. I find the question impossible to answer, beca...

Tax is a difficult topic to bring to life in journalism. Statutory Budgets offer an opportunity to look at how tax affects people in meaningful ways. CEJA director Reg Rumney has compiled 10 tips for reporters on covering tax issues arising from the national Budget in particular (please click on the Research tab and visit the Publications section to retrieve the PDF).

Making Data Meaningful, A Guide to Writing Stories about Numbers, UNITED NATIONS, New York and Geneva, 2009http://www.unece.org/stats/documents/writing/MDM_Part1_English.pdf Reg Rumney Journalists could learn a thing or two from this UN publication, though it is aimed at managers and media relations officers in statistical agencies. The guide advises that for statistics to mean anything, their ...

I find the visual presentation of data in our business news media boring and often not particularly informative.   Glancing through a UN document on the presentation of stats, Making data meaningful Part 2 and a recent article in the Economist magazine, it occurs to me that there is a startling new world of graphics out there I certainly have not been aware of and that we could be making us...

Reg RumneyThe big surprise in the Budget this year was that there was a big surprise. It should be straightforward if not exactly a yawn. The presentation of the national Budget does not contain the big shocks of the apartheid years.The ANC in government has adopted an approach of much greater transparency. The biggest change has been the adoption of three-year rolling budgets and the presentation...

As a performance, Pravin Gordhan’s maiden Budget speech deserved as much applause as he got for the content. Perhaps he deserved more spontaneous applause than his jokes achieved — he had to chide the MPs.   And yet if the comments of intelligent and educated young people are anything to go by, I have some real pointers for Pravin   Evaluating the speech as communication was one of t...

"Studies show that only roughly 22% (21.06% to be precise) of journalists are numerate, a one percent decrease from last year, when around 23% (23.74%) were found capable of handling figures (separate studies also found that 74.62% of statistics are made up)." What's wrong with this sentence? CEJA provides 10 tips for journalists to avoid some of the more obvious numerical errors.

If you've ever wanted to move into business journalism but have no economics or commercial qualification or experience, the School of Journalism and Media Studies at Rhodes University has just the course for you. It would also be ideal if you are starting out in business journalism and quickly want to get up to speed in your profession. This April Rhodes is offering a short-course in economics f...

Just too many numbers. That was my initial feeling in reviewing TV coverage on the evening of Budget day.Some of the Budget coverage I saw on TV followed the stale tradition of throwing figures at the viewer, in the form of graphics, and at the listener, in the voiceover.A billion there, 10 billion here. What does it all mean?Without context, the figures are worse than meaningless. They are boring...

The formerly little-watched Baltic Dry Goods Index had by November 10 2008 fallen more than 90% from its May peak. Why this is important is that this index is a "leading indicator", something that anticipates economic shifts. The value of the index is that it is intimately wound up with the global "real economy", and is not subject to speculation. In other words it is not a financial indicator...

Libor stands for the London Interbank Offered Rate, and is the rate at which banks borrow money from one another, from 1 day to 5 years.   At present Libor is being closely watched because the rising Libor is evidence of the credit freeze. Banks are unwilling to lend to one another because of fears that the borrower will default. This is known as counterparty risk.   Those banks tha...

The Economist magazine headline wittily summed deleveraging up as, "A fate worse than debt".   What it simply means is the opposite of leveraging, which itself can mean more than one thing, but at its most basic is borrowing money for investment purposes.   So a company is leveraged when raises debt to invest; being highly leveraged is having a much higher level of debt than equity....

The metaphor is obvious: use debt as a lever off equity to get a greater return on investment. Answers.com, in a comphensive definition, covers the two most common uses of the word in the financial markets:   1. Using various financial instruments or borrowed capital to increase the potential return of an investment. This includes buying shares on margin.   2. "The amount of deb...

Satirical columnist Ben Trovato in the Sunday Times this weekend (October 12) summed up the feeling of many readers about the global credit crisis and market crash:   "I have tried to understand what's going on. I really have. But I get confused when people say, by way of explanation: 'This is deleveraging of global economies'. Deleveraging? If they can make up words like that with a strai...

A headline in the business section of a national newspaper this past weekend (October 5 2008) referred to South Africa’s “economic downturn”.Yet the most recent statistics show that in the second quarter economic growth was positive. In fact, it was almost 5%.Ironically, this doesn’t mean that South Africa isn’t heading for recession. But we should wait for it to happen before we report it.Another...

By Reg Rumney   Two articles in two different newspapers recently have carried stern warnings not to be lulled by soothing noises coming out of the ANC about economic policy staying unchanged.   Rather, they say, expect radical change from the new grouping around Jacob Zuma, as the union movement and SA Communist Party demand return favours for their loyal support.   Finance M...

The Dow Jones index is, with the S&P 500, the most widely watched indicator of the health of the stock market in the United States of America.Its plunge in 1929 and 1987 mark the two big “crashes” in US stock markets, and its decline below the 10,000, a level it took around 10 years to reach, has marked the severity of the decline in US stock markets now.The Dow Jones, as it is colloquially kn...

Together with the Dow Jones Index, the S&P 500 is one of the most highly watched barometers of the U.S. stock market. It is arguably a more accurate reflection of the stock market, because it comprises a much larger number of companies than the Dow Jones index.The index includes 500 large companies in leading industries of the U.S. economy, covering 75% of US equities, according to Standard &a...

CEJA applauds Fin24 for taking the time to explain “basis point”, a term that crops up all the time when financial journalists discuss interest rises and declines. Click the link to read more.

"HIGH staff turnover, remuneration an enduring issue, skills shortages, little in-house or on-the-job training — these are the kinds of skills problems experienced in SA’s business newsrooms, according to a survey," writes EDWARD WEST in the Weekender.Read more.

By Reg Rumney, Director of CEJA   South Africa lost one of its greatest investigative journalists and a fine thinker when Deon Basson died this week.   What endeared him to me, aside from my admiration of his understanding of insurance companies and the determination that made him one of South Africa's finest investigative business journalists, was a lack of obvious vanity.   ...

On August 27 Reg Rumney, director of CEJA, presented the results of a survey of the country's top business editors to some of the editors themselves and other interested parties.   The presentation was held at the Rosebank Hotel.   Professor Guy Berger of Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies introduced the director.   Pearson chair of economics and CEJA academic co-o...

An e-mail doing the rounds in the journalism department at Rhodes is a complaint from an ordinary citizen about South African journalism’s apparent obsession with bad news. Journalists will tell you that the mundane and everyday aren’t news. A report that all planes landed safely at O.R. Tambo today is not news: a report that a plane fell out of the sky and killed all on board is news. But t...

Many myths have arisen about inflation and interest rates in South Africa, with a host of commentators climbing on the bandwagon of “interest rate rises don’t work in combating inflation”. The debate is important, and all views should be heard. But the discussion is bedevilled by misconception and misunderstanding. Here’s an attempt to get some sanity into the debate about the role of the cen...

There are a number of ways of looking at inflation. One definition is that inflation is simply the erosion of the buying power of a currency. You now need around R150 to buy what R10 in 1980 could buy. Download PDF 230 KB