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, because while one category of entries may decline in quality one year, another may have more excellent entries than the year before.

Even if I look further back in history it is not easy to say financial journalism was worse or better overall. Can one compare the conditions in which Howard Preece won the first competition in 1975, with those of today? The only real contenders back then were the Rand Daily Mail business section and the Financial Mail.

One notable change in the awards that reflects the change in the business journalism landscape is the rise of personal finance. Indeed in 2006 Bruce Cameron, editor of Personal Finance, was the Sanlam Financial Journalist of the Year.

When I first entered journalism personal finance didn't exist in South Africa. The financial pages tended to exclude all those not already in the know or the very persistent, though even then some financial journalists like Preece knew the value of making stories intelligible.

Add to this the problem that good research usually trumps good writing in financial journalism. The man who so far proved to be most consistent overall winner of the Sanlam Awards, the late Deon Basson, retired from the competition after winning it for the sixth time. He was not known for his elegant prose style but for his understanding of finance and his remorseless tracking down of fraudsters.

 Personal finance to be effective needs both good research and good writing. It cannot serve its educative function if it does not engage the reader or viewer or listener. And worthy but boring writing will turn too many people off.

The Sanlam Awards introduced a section on personal finance for non-financial publications some years back to encourage this kind of public service writing and it seems to have worked. Mass medium magazines like Huisgenoot and Bona have excellent personal finance writers who home in on aspects of finance that affect readers directly.

The winner of the personal finance section of the Sanlam Awards this year wrote an intensely personal account of descent into debt and ascent out of it. Such stories always get my vote because they show the emotional consequence of personal debt, the ease with which it creeps up on the unsuspecting, the havoc it wreaks.

And while writing about personal finance has become more sophisticated, so has finance.

Investment choices for ordinary people when I started reporting were limited to property, savings accounts, fixed deposits, shares, annuities, and a few vanilla unit trusts. Participation mortgage bonds were the safest and most flexible investments for pensioners. A much wider variety faces potential investors today.

The routes to possible financial ruin have also multiplied: credit cards, personal loans, car loans with balloon payments have joined the trusty prison of the poor, hire purchase.

But why should only personal finance get this treatment? It's a pointer to a problem that still plagues some writing about business, the inability or unwillingness to get rid of jargon and cut through informational clutter to communicate.

Perhaps a bigger problem than a love of jargon and an inability to communicate clearly arises when financial reporters become "embedded" in the industry about which they report, without even knowing they are.

Property reporting is my personal bugbear.

Economist Robert Shiller has pointed out that only fairly recently in history has residential property become unconsciously framed as an investment for the homeowners rather than as a place to live. Shiller has pointed out that home ownership can be seen as a risky leveraged investment.

Renting is in many places, such as Switzerland, much more common that ownership, and our own property economist Erwin Rode has written that South Africans have become overly fixated on home ownership.

The overemphasis on home-buying has led to the kind of manic booms we have seen in housing all over the world, and which was at the heart of the global recession that we still suffer from, directly or indirectly.

And why is it that increases in property prices are always seen as positive, and declines always as negative? The only way young people very often get a chance to jump on the property merry-go-round is when it slows down a little.

Financial reporters, particularly those who report on the market, must ask themselves what role news media play in creating hysteria of real estate bubbles.

Similarly, financial journalists must ask themselves if they are reporting on markets, including housing markets, in a way that is responsible. Are they penetrating below the surface to find the kind of information that enables readers to make informed choices?

Are they simply repeating those who talk to their book, as the saying goes?

As helpful as personal finance articles themselves are, they should be supported by better business journalism generally.

This year Rob Rose won the overall Sanlam Award, for among others articles, those he did on the Tannenbaum fraud that cost many middle-class people their savings, sometimes their life savings.

Rose came across the story too late to forewarn the many investors who were taken for a ride, but perhaps a few readers will be wary the next time some scheme that is too good to be true comes along. Exposing the many scams and schemes is in its own way a contribution to personal finance, by forewarning people of such perils.