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Business & Finance, Media, Trinidad & Tobago

This is not the time to not know what you’re talking about

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Several months ago, I bemoaned T&T’s “apparent lack of reporters who actually understand business, finance, law”.

The absence of sufficiently qualified finance and business reporters from the halls of T&T’s newsrooms is even more galling now, as the global financial crisis deepens.

And make no mistake, it is a crisis – one that few people in the Caribbean seem to have heard of, and even fewer to understand.

A recent post over at Media Watch provides a compelling example of this disconnect. In it, the author of the blog – “Martine” – is taken to task by a reader over her description of the recent declines in the US stock market as a “crash”.

Good. Because while American equity markets have gyrated wildly in recent weeks, and have fallen quite preciptiously from their historic highs, they have not crashed.

But Martine makes two additional errors in that post.

First, she refers to her recent posts on the “US stock market crisis.”

There is no US stock market crisis. There is a global financial crisis – every equity market in the world has been hurt by the fall-out from what started as a meltdown in the US housing market. And the problems are not confined to equities (stocks) – credit (debt) markets have also been seriously affected.

Second, and more serious still, is this statement:

We hope Curtis Rampersad of the Express will take to heart your point as well, since he also referred to the issue as a crash in his story on the AIG bailout in the Wednesday edition.

“There will be no immediate fallout but the crash in the US financial system and a global recession may inevitably affect investors and consumers in Trinidad and Tobago, a financial expert has suggested.”

Rarely do I defend Express reporters, but Mr Rampersad did no such thing.

Rather, Martine is wrongly conflating two entirely separate issues – events that may be reasonably be described as having caused a “crash in the US financial system” and a panic in the US stock market, which is only a small part of the whole.

Mr Rampersad’s article as a whole does a decent job of summarizing a complex topic, and I will comment on it here (my comments are in brackets):

There will be no immediate fallout but the crash in the US financial system and a global recession may inevitably affect investors and consumers in Trinidad and Tobago, a financial expert has suggested.

(May inevitably? Grammatical quibbles aside, it is safe to say that investors and consumers in Trinidad and Tobago will be affected)

In addition, there are new concerns from international companies operating here who may be worried about the effects of the largest financial meltdown in the United States in almost a century.

(Good)

Republic Bank’s senior economist Dr Ronald Ramkissoon said yesterday that the turmoil in the US markets at the weekend arose because people were encouraged to save and invest in a range of products in different countries and while the returns were great, it also meant that risks were higher.

(Not exactly, but a decent effort. The recent turmoil in the US markets – and again, credit as well as equity, to say nothing of commodities and currencies – reflects a collapse in investor confidence in the strength and viability of institutions that are heavily exposed to risky financial instruments, etc.)

The fates of major financial institutions Lehman Bros and Merrill Lynch redrew Wall Street’s financial landscape as the former has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and the latter was forced to sell to Bank of America.

(Very good, but some context would be helpful. What do Lehman Brothers and Merill Lynch do? Why did the latter agree in principle to merge with Bank of America?)

They were brought down by billions of US dollars in losses arising out of risky real estate and mortgage transactions.

(Well done.)

He said there could also be concerns from energy companies operating here about insurance coverage issues following the meltdown in the US.

(Worst sentence in the piece. Unclear. Should have either been better explained or edited out completely.)

Monday’s New York trading also saw the American International Group, the world’s largest insurer, scrambling to raise capital to stay afloat.9

(Good, but context.Why did it need capital? What happened to its billions of dollars in assets? Also no mention that AIG is the parent company of Algico)

Ramkissoon said during a telephone interview yesterday that this was not the first time large institutions failed in the world.

(True, but not since the Great Depression in the US have so many failed so swiftly, and back in 1929 the world was neither so complex nor so interconnected)

At times like this, he said it was useful to take a long-term view as it would not last forever. He noted that falling stock prices could actually benefit investors once the market had bottomed out.

(Statements like this piss me off. Why is it useful? How could investors benefit? When will the market ‘bottom’? What about the interim?)

With regard to the current financial meltdown, Ramkissoon said: “I see this as a correction phase and when you take the long view, there comes a time when you have to roll with the punches.”

(If by rolling with the punches he means, “be spectacularly bailed out by the US government”, sure. The man is clearly a Keynesian – in the long run, we are all dead and what not)

Local investors and depositors at local commercial banks should not be worried “right now” as their investments were safe because financial institutions here did not engage in some of the risky ventures Wall Street firms executed.

(Tricky. How does he know that? And take RBTT – recently bought out by Canada’s RBC – how does you know that RBC has not engaged in risky ventures? There’s no evidence to back up this statemen, and therefore no way to judge its veracity)

He said people’s money was safe but cautioned that the global economic situation would affect locals through recessionary problems.

(Again, really? What about people who have invested in the stock market, which is always a risk? What about people who have invested in funds linked to the performance of overseas stock markets? What, exactly, are “recessionary problems”?)

The fall in prices for commodities like crude oil, the rise in global food prices, plus the negative effects on travel and tourism could affect countries like T&T, he added.

American Chamber president Eugene Tiah was also concerned yesterday about the financial troubles in the US.

“Clearly now there is a complexity in terms of investments. Companies and countries invest in complex ways and one area of concern may be how they are linked” to companies in the US, he said in a telephone interview from his Phoenix Park Gas Processors office at Pt Lisas.

(Now that’s a good quote)

These subjects are not easy to write about, by any means. But they are far too important to get wrong.


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Media, Trinidad & Tobago

The T&T Guardian needs more than a cosmetic change

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For the sake of my blood pressure, I try not to read the local newspapers. This is difficult, given my obsession with news and media and my day job as a reporter, and more often than not I succumb.

And each time I pick up a copy of the Trinidad Express, or the Guardian, or the Newsday, I am disappointed, embarrassed, infuriated by the spelling and grammar mistakes, the obvious lack of editing, the flagrant plagiarism and copyright infringement, the errors and the inaccuracies.

Which brings me to the Guardian’s redesign. Aesthetically, the new design is a significant step up from the monochromatic drabness of the paper’s previous incarnation. But the changes are all superficial – in terms of content, it’s business as usual.

Take this gem from the editorial on Tuesday June 10 hyping the redesign:

“…readers will notice the introduction of new typography (called fonts) which should make the reading experience more enjoyable.”

New typography called fonts eh? You couldn’t make it up. But this is a minor quibble, compared with the delicious irony of an error in a story printed just above a blurb outlining the paper’s corrections policy on page A3.

(And now that I know the Guardian does have a policy of correcting “significant errors as soon as possible”, I intend to keep them informed of the many mistakes that litter their pages. I will report back on how that goes, so watch this space.)

The Media Watch blog also picked up on the error, noting:

On page A3 there’s an interesting story about a young man who appeared in court charged with turning off a computer in the Register General Department.

And would you believe directly below that story is a section called Getting It Right, which says “It is the Guardian’s policy to correct significant errors as soon as possible.”

Directly below.

You might say that was not a significant error since the writer of the story really just meant to say Registrar General’s Department…

There were some errors of transposition – is the name of gentleman referred to in the story “Man left to die on hospital bed” (story by Radhica Sookraj, photo by Rishi Ragoonath) Anthony Atlo or Anthony Alto?

And quite a lot of editorialising. Michelle Loubon’s report on a promoter “fuming” over the $200,000 he is being asked to pay to rent the Jean Pierre Complex for a Learie Joseph concert provides one example of this widespread practice: “[Glasgow] flatly refused to pay the exorbitant price.” (emphasis mine)

You may think $200,000 is exorbinant, Ms Loubon, but no one asked for your opinion. This is a news story, not an editorial.

And of course, my favourite bug bear, an absolute outbreak of pieces without bylines. Media Watch highlighed two of the more pernicious examples:

On page B34 there’s a story on sleep titled ‘How Much Sleep Do You Really Need?’. We thought it looked familiar, but there was no byline in the Guardian so we searched the net and found it – the same story we read last week at Time.com.

The story on page C16 on hearing loss also looked familiar. Ah yes. We read it on the BBC website on Monday. They copied down to the picture of the ear.

Come on editor, where is the attribution? Why can’t you stick in somewhere in the story where it was copied wholesale from? This is not the first time you’ve done this and it’s not a habit you should be happily repeating. What about copyright issues?

None of the financial market reports had bylines either, while the oil report on A11 was lifted – without attribution, of course – from a Reuters story. Separately, in the salmon-coloured Business Guardian, the Commentary on page 26 – “Apple to unveil faster IPhone [sic]” showed either a complete lack of news judgement, or a studied laziness on behalf of the editors.

Ladies and gentlemen of the Guardian, Apple unveiled a faster iPhone on Monday. This Bloomberg story, to which you devoted a whole page and an ad for West Indies Stockbrokers, is four days old. Four days. Please, get out from under that rock and sort your paper out.

Moving on.

Then there’s the blurb in the classifieds section, which blithely states: “you can place your ad by phone any pay by credit card.”

I presume they meant “and pay”, but you just never know.

And someone tell Bobie-Lee Dixon that it is possible to write an interview-based feature without fawning over one’s subject (in this case, Diane “Radical Designs” Hunt). And that “fashionist” is not a word.

But I digress. Here’s Dixon on Hunt:

Even in her “dress down mode” Hunt seems well colour coordinated with a look that just says, “hey I know my fashion,” and indeed she does.

With a winning smile across her face Hunt said her dream and aspiration is to make a serious contribution to fashion in helping to organise the industry and to make it more viable

And what is with the aversion to “said”? It’s a good word. A simple word. And it avoids having to write things like this:

Hunt also gave a breakdown of the different types of fashions that exists. “People only think of fashion as the designer,” she articulated.

I will not, for the sake of my aforementioned bloodpressure, comment on the sheer wrong-ness of “different types of fashions that exists.”

Sigh.

Media, Trinidad & Tobago

Says who? (or, why bylines matter)

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Trinidadian newspapers infuriate me.

I’ve already written at length about their lack of a systematic corrections policy, and the superficiality of much of our reporting; today’s bugbear is their casual approach to bylines.

In the context of a newspaper article, a byline is simply the name and often, the title or position of the person(s) who wrote the story.

Sometimes, particularly in the case of editorials – which are opinion pieces written by editors or columnists – explicit bylines are omitted. Editorials in The Express, for instance, are labelled “Express Editorial.”

Since an editorial represents the officially-endorsed (or mandated) “line” of the newspaper on a given topic, the identity of the author is unimportant. The author is the newspaper.

But news stories and analysis pieces are different; they are supposed to be objective and fact-based, rather than polemical and necessarily partisan.

But no one is entirely objective, and no reporter, however scrupulous, is immune to bias.

Moreover, as the bloggers over Eastwick Communications, a technology PR agency, noted:

By the time we read any news article or watch any news segment, even the most “objective” news has been run through a series of bias filters. Each news department selects which stories to cover and which reporters to cover it. Each reporter selects which aspects of a story to focus on and which details of all possible details to include in the story. And editors make selective changes to fit a variety of criteria.

All news is filtered. This is an inescapable fact, and it is why the identity of the author of the story – or in the case of syndicated or externally-sourced content, the source – is so important.

If a story appears in a newspaper (or on a newspaper’s website) without a byline, I have no way of knowing who wrote it, or where it came from.

Here are a few case studies of why bylines matter.

The Trinidad Express ran a piece on Monday 17 March titled “RBTT…what to do?”. The online version of that story, and the only one I have access to, nowhere states where it came from, or who the author was.

It began thus:

In our last article we evaluated the fairness of the valuation of the Per Share Consideration in the proposed Amalgamation of RBTT Financial Holdings Ltd (RBTT) and RBC Holdings (Trinidad and Tobago).

The valuation was conducted using the Discounted Cash Flow methodology. You would recall that based on our calculations the Per Share Consideration of TT$40.00 was not considered unreasonable.

Our article today, the last in our short series, concludes our discussion of the question of valuation, by examining the Earnings Multiple Method, in order to further test the fairness of the valuation of the deal. We will also provide our recommendation to shareholders.

Now, this was not a news story, or even an analysis piece, and it was most certainly not written by a reporter.

This is investment advice, and I don’t know who this “we” is. If I were an RBTT shareholder (and I am not), I would want to know whether the entity advising me to accept the RBC buyout had a vested interested (i.e. they’d make money) in seeing the deal go through.

Without knowing who wrote the piece, I would have no way of checking that.

A counterpoint to the way this report is presented is a similar story in the Jamaica Observer, which the Express syndicated on March 19th (with the a glaring typo in the headline: “Jamacian analysts look forward to bank purchase.” Aargh.)

A financial expert in Jamaica believes that the proposed sale of RBTT Bank to the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) would increase diversity in the sector while another is saying the potential deal should be looked at in a long-term perspective.

Alexander James, a stockbroker at First Global Financial Services, echoed the view that “the RBTT sale brings a lot more diversity into the market”, the Jamaica Observer reported.

I object to the description of Mr Alexander James as a “financial expert”; a stockbroker is someone who buys and sells shares on behalf of clients on a commission basis. Mr James is not a financial analyst or investment advisor.

Still, at least the Observer named names and companies, and the piece as a whole is well reported.

Here’s another example of a missing byline, also from the Express on March 19, in the Business Magazine section:

Microsoft Corp chairman Bill Gates said he expects the next decade to bring even greater technological leaps than the past 10 years.

That’s fine. That’s uncontroversial. That’s seriously dishonest.

No Express reporter wrote that story. The author was a business writer named Matthew Barakat, of the Associated Press news service.

Now, the Express regularly uses material from services like AP, Reuters and Bloomberg. In newsroom jargon, these are the major “wire” services, which newspapers and other media outlets use for the stories and photographs they don’t themselves have the resources to produce.

These wire services allow newspapers like the Express to syndicate their copy – for a fee, and with the agreement that they will be credited as the source.

Reproducing content from outside sources – without attribution and without permission – is not just sloppy. It’s plagiarism.

The Express isn’t the only one to do this sort of thing, and on a regular basis. The Newsday is notorious for this.

The Media Watch blog highlighted a recent example, in which Newsday “reprinted” an article about the murder of British socialite Gale Benson in Trinidad in January 1972.

The piece, which Newsday ran on February 24, was lifted wholesale from a British newspaper – the Daily Mail. Newsday did not credit either the author (Victoria Moore), or the source.

This kind of behaviour would get an university undergraduate expelled, but the editors of Trinidad’s daily newspapers seem unconcerned – which is, in itself, deeply distressing.