Fortune magazine editor-at-large, Alan Sloan, spoke yesterday to journalism students at SMU in part, regarding business journalism. He also made references to journalism in its entirety and offered his thoughts on its future.
Sloan, a 63-year-old former reporter from Brooklyn, New York, described his early years as a journalist. He started writing about business in the late 60s in Charlotte, North Carolina before there was any demand for it and said that, “there has never been more of a need to understand the world of business than now.”
He went on to explain that because of the Internet, there is no end of information, as records, stories, speeches, and court cases may all be found through on-line research.
He predicted that the need for good journalism will never perish, saying that, “as long as there is a demand for a sane and rational voice, there is hope.”
His only criticism is that the business of journalism needs to be altered in order to be more profitable without cutting back on employees. He scorned the saying, “doing more with less.”
“You end up doing less with less,” Sloan said. “It will cause the business to have bigger problems.”
His advice to students, that I found simple in theory, yet so profound, is that our job should be to find information, distill it, and write it in english that normal people can grasp.
Sloan said, “because you’re writing stuff people can understand, you can change what’s going on in the world and determine events.”
It does sound quite simple but it certainly is a complex and elaborate task.
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Good post. There was more external than personal voice in this post. Try and weigh in a bit more.
And use more links. Links=prominence.
The summary was quite good.
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