Once was business columnist

I've been deep in the world of daily breaking news for almost all of my career as a professional journalist, but I have tried to specialise a few times, and learned something new about myself and the world every time. 

I did just enough sports journalism to know I could never do it forever (how do you do the same thing over and over again?); I tried some entertainment writing, only to find it took all the fun out of the fun things in life; and I did just enough full-time court reporting to build up some reporting skills and get the hell out before it rotted my soul.

I never did any political reporting. I do have some standards.

But for a couple of years, I was a business journalist, and lived every day in the corporate world. And for somebody from a working class background, I learned a lot about the executive class, and the things that matter to them.  

It was surprisingly easy to talk the talk - my boss always said it was much, much easier to hire decent journalists and teach them how to speak business talk, than teach businesspeople to write. This always makes me think about Ben Affleck scoffing on the Armageddon commentary track about it being easier to train oil drillers to go into space than train space scientists to drill, but sometimes some skills really are easier to pick up than others.

During my time as a business journalist, I did a hell of a lot of stories about the ups and downs of industry, and even wrote some columns about the sharemarket, when I never bet a dime of my own on that kind if institutionalised gambling. It was actually terribly easy, you just had to be halfway decent at pattern recognition in similar industries, and could always construct a quick narrative out of those patterns.

It also helped that I came into business journalism just as the world was recovering from the global economic meltdown of the late 2000s, since every column was about how everybody was recovering from the crunch.

My own big stockmarket tip is to look at the companies that make the products that get used in other products, because they predict the entire market. There was a company that made resin, and on the face of it, it was the most boring company in the world, but it had sales downturns three months before everybody else. It wasn't as sexy as something like the vast economic wasteland of venture capitalism, but it was obvious when you recognise it.

The other thing I learned, to my vague horror, was that the executive class were generally clueless about the work their company actually did. Just rampant base ignorance about their own business, hiding it beneath the most odious clichés, the most blatant business-speak. I'd always thought the kings of industry had got that way through sheer merit, but was constantly shown that they were usually just lucky or merciless, and could generally be outsmarted by a sausage dog.

Being an entertainment journo showed me that I shouldn't try to make a living with the things I enjoy doing the most, and being a court reporter made me cynical about the entire justice system, but being a business reporter showed me that most businesspeople don't know shit, and are alarmingly disinterested in moving past that.

Since then it's been breaking news on digital platforms for me, and I can leave the job behind when I finish my shift. But I still remember that lingering discomfort that our entire economy is run by people who are short-sighted, utterly lacking in any kind of human empathy, and just fucking dumb.