People find business news a serious bore. And the reason is probably only one — gobbledygook. Defined as wordiness and jargon, this is about the only reason readers skip the financial pages of the newspaper and change the channel when Business Weekly comes up on television. And our media appears stuck in the mud over the issue.

We turn on the television at "business" time and hear only phrases like "blue chips", "data infrastructure", and "excess liquidity". We arrive at the financial section in the newspaper and under the Daily Nation’s Tuesday story, ‘Exporters focus on the shilling’s stability’, read sentences like, "Kenya has all along maintained a floating exchange rate regime".

Rarely do we read stories like "Hard times warning over oil", the back-page story on the last Sunday Nation, that told us how matatu fares are likely to go up largely because of America’s wars. It’s a good bet that most people did not notice this was a financial story. And therein lies the trick. It is when business stories pass the test of layman understanding that they actually make sense.

Yet, our media houses consistently fail to simplify business stories. Financial stories remain buried in the obscure inside pages of the newspapers. And from KTN to CNN, these stories, like the weather, remain tacked onto the end of news broadcasts.

The reason for not simplifying business stories and jerking them up to front-page headlines lies in a misconception. Editors and producers appear to believe that business, like some private club, is a preserve of a select few in society. They appear to believe that such stories interest only financial nuts — bankers, stockbrokers, and the lot that fancy the Kenya School of Monetary Studies. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Whereas the West can afford to relegate business news to less prime spots, developing economies, such as Africa, cannot afford to. The reason lies in understanding the concept of development journalism, a beat that the United States International University, for example, is beginning to focus on.

Development journalism springs from the premise that journalism is not only about politics, crime, calamity and scandal. Journalism is also about communities doing things for themselves. So, if newspapers and broadcasters would highlight what people are doing to help transform their lives, be it alongside government or on their own, development would be well served. And this is where business stories come in.

Reporters forget it too often, but business news affects the lives of both the banker and Wanjiku, the single mother waiting in line to buy bread at a kiosk. Reporters forget Wanjiku because they continue to write and tell stories that are both complicated and boring.

And this is exactly the problem: that business news is frequently complicated and boring. The goal of the skilled reporter is to turn this around and make business news understandable and interesting.

I can think of three rules to uncomplicated this beat. One: explain. Two: explain. And three: explain some more. Business news must be made understandable for the average educated citizen. Won’t the sophisticated reader laugh at us? Probably, yes, if we insult their intelligence. But it is humbling to imagine that The Wall Street Journal, America’s best selling newspaper, still insists on explaining economic and business concepts to lay readers. Whenever the term Gross National Product first appears in a story, for example, it is followed with the explanation that GNP is the "total value of a nations’ output of goods and services". By defining even common economic terms, the Journal makes economic news understandable.

The next challenge is to make business interesting. The short answer is: focus less on statistics and more on people. Business is full of dramas involving successes, failures and rivals struggling to outdo one another. Yet, reporters too often forget to write about the human beings behind the statistics.

An effective example is this week’s compelling story in the Financial Standard of how Kenya’s first private international airline was sold off for what the original owner called "a song" – Sh5! That, clearly, was a front-page story. (But we, being incurably stuck on politics, let an LDP story take the cake, yet again!)

It was a story of bitter rivalry between one Anthony Kagode and Adam Ogden, who between them took the East African Safari Air to the skies a couple of years ago. For a business news, the story had more than one sweet surprise. It started off with people, real people.

"Kegode’s wife, Elizabeth and Ogden’s wife, Karen, were best friends," the Standard wrote. "They all went to the same clubs, gym, and played polo together. Since they share the same plot [at Nairobi’s Hardy Estate in Lang’ata], their children still play together."

And then the crux of the matter: "Today, both families are entangled in a vicious legal battle in which Ogden is demanding that the Kegodes return Sh136 million that they took from East African Safari Air before they sold it to him."

But the powerfully written story fell prey to gobbledygook when the writer casually slipped in a few pieces of economic jargon that he forgot to explain. "The bad blood [between Kegode and Ogden] was, however, sown by an agreement and a debenture that Kegode is alleged to have signed […] with Chase Bank," he wrote.

And just because of one word in that sentence — debenture — the average educated reader was lost.

Kill gobbledygook and put people at the heart of business reporting and we just could turn this into a favourite news segment.

 Kodi Barth teaches journalism at United States International University-Nairobi.
If you have seen questionable content in the press, write to kodi@kodibarth.com
Website: www.kodibarth.com/

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