Abstract
This article investigates the perceived accessibility of business news in some South African newspapers of which the target reader is the average consumer of news in a predominantly black readership market. A sample of readers and editors/journalists were interviewed as part of an explorative, qualitative research design. The respondents were of the opinion that newspapers, such as City Press, Sowetan and Sunday World, fail to write business articles that are easily understandable because the financial jargon used in stories confounds the average news consumer. However, 95% of the respondents agreed that the business section of Daily Sun uses simple language in its reporting. It is argued that a new set of guidelines to report business or financial news is needed to rectify the status quo. Eight guidelines for reporting business news for the average news consumer are proposed.
Highlights
AND RATIONALEBusiness or financial journalism has grown in popularity and in reputation
The findings presented represent the readers’ perception of challenges to the accessibility of business news
The majority of the participants pointed out that the business sections of the newspapers that primarily focus on readers such as themselves, namely Sowetan, City Press and Sunday World, were not user-friendly or understandable to them
Summary
AND RATIONALEBusiness or financial journalism has grown in popularity and in reputation. Business journalism is the branch of journalism that tracks, records, analyses and interprets the economic changes that take place in a society. It can include anything from personal finance, business at the local market and shopping malls, to the performance of well-known and less well-known companies (Loiko 2011). The Fuggers used the newsletter to inform their clients of news that could affect the European economy during this period. They hired the first business journalists, whose job it was to write reports on the prices of products and services and the arrival and departure of ships. A newsletter titled Price Currents, styled on the Fuggers’ newsletter, followed in the 17th century in Amsterdam (Tawe 2012: 21). Roush (2006) records that in 1843, James Wilson, a Scottish hat maker, established the Economist newspaper in London, and The Wall Street Journal was launched in 1889 in the United States
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