Literary financial journalism

Chalk this one up for the annals of self-defeat: it won’t take

long before the tireless spiders of Google chance upon this posting

and thereby rid my favourite

web page of its punch. ‘Your search – “literary financial

journalism” – did not match any documents’ it says, or said:

I love the idea of the most comprehensive search engine in the world,

an index of Borgesian proportions, trawling through its billions of

documents in vain, seeking but never finding the object of our present

discourse.

On the other hand, there’s an upside: for a while at least, anybody

searching for “literary financial journalism” on Google will

find but one result. For the purposes of Google, Felix Salmon (or felixsalmon.com)

will be the first and last word on the subject.

That shouldn’t be the case, I think. After all, literary journalism

is nothing new: most of us, off the top of our heads, can rattle off

a list from George Orwell and John Hersey through Truman Capote to Tom

Wolfe and PJ O’Rourke. Magazines from GQ to Rolling Stone pride

themselves on their literary heritages; the Atlantic and Harper’s

go further and define themselves by theirs. Then, of course, there’s

the New Yorker, the grandaddy of them all.

But financial magazines don’t think that way, and, with the possible

exception of Michael Lewis at the New York Times Magazine, the financial

journalism which appears in the generalist press (John Cassidy in the

New Yorker; Joseph Stiglitz in the New York Review of Books) aspires

more to authoritativeness than it does to any kind of lasting style.

Part of the reason, I think, is that journalism is always written

with a certain readership in mind, and financial professionals generally

mistrust ornament and beauty: such things tend not to outperform the

market. They’re perfectly happy amassing important collections

of contemporary art, of course, but that’s different: that’s

a hobby, a sideline, not work.

There’s an interesting contrast with lawyers here: while much

legal prose is impenetrably dry, there is a long and glowing tradition

of carefully and beautifully written juridical opinions, many of which

are admired as much for their prose as they are for their clarity and

insight.

The best that financial editors ever hope for, by contrast, is a coherent

and compelling narrative structure: a story well told, with a beginning,

middle and end. And even that’s rare enough, vanishingly so outside

the world of M&A.

It’s also worth noting why most major mergers are quickly followed

by detailed back-stories in the press: the companies need to file various

legal documents to the SEC, and the lawyers who draft those papers generally

put in quite a lot of colour. In other words, those narrative pieces

aren’t reported, most of the time, they’re more copied out.

For the time being, rhetorical flourishes in the world of financial

journalism never seem to rise above the level of description –

what the protagonists are wearing, how their offices are decorated,

which Bordeaux they ordered at the celebratory dinner. Metaphor tends

to appear only in the guise of cliché.

So, Felix, I hear you ask, are you going to stake your claim to this

relatively virgin territory? I dunno, I think I ought to talk to my

editors first. Besides, I’m not even sure I’m capable of it:

I’ve never written anything literary in my life. But someone ought

to go there, and I’ll be cheering them on.