There was a time when the Australian Financial Review, the Wall St Journal, the Financial Times, the Nihon Keizai Shimbun could pretty much take their readers for granted. They were the business papers of record for their nations: anyone in business who turned up at a meeting, a conference, a lunch and was not familiar with what was in that day’s paper was in danger of missing out or not being taken seriously. The papers had to be accurate, they had to be worthy, they had to contain information of importance to readers. But they could get away with being boring.
Today these papers must still be all these things but they must also be compelling. They no longer have monopolies. They must compete with business stories written for the web, for blogs, wires, on Twitter. Business writing today, whatever the medium, can no longer take its readers for granted, it can no longer be dull.
That in itself has made business writing a much broader oeuvre but beyond new competition there has been a realisation more broadly that business matters, that it is not just something of interest to accountants and stock brokers. We live in a capitalist society, our everyday lives are subject to the dismal science of economics – something reinforced dramatically by the financial crisis of 2008, which continues to roil our lives.
In the first edition of a new annual anthology showcasing the best of Australian business writing to be published by NewSouth in November 2012, editor Andrew Cornell shows that the best business writing has always been about more than business: it is about history, ethics, crime, intrigue, and morality.
