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For 10 years the terror of businessmen
Business Times investment writer JULIE WALKER reflects on a decade in the
turbulent waters of financial journalism
I had verbally accepted a job with Business Day when David Carte, the then editor of Business Times, made me an offer I couldn't refuse: normal hours, an extra R250 a month and, if he liked the way I wrote, my own column. A fortnight later I was handed the Diagonal Street column and told to fill it each week. In at the deep end, I guess I must have swum to be here a decade later: Carte took a risk with me which I don't believe I would ever take with someone else. The training was minimal. I was given strict instructions on how to behave at press conferences: don't ask your best questions in front of all those other idiots. To this day, I seldom do. I like to know the answer before I put an awkward question in public. The early days were marked by dozens of new listings and well-dressed prospectuses piling on my desk as I found it hard to turn down requests for interviews and lunches. Almost as many calls came from a booming public relations industry: so many squeaky voices from the Trixie-Belles of XYZ - "Are you using my press release?" If they could see the vinyl of my desk-top for press releases, perhaps they'd be more specific. PR is filled with ex-journos and there is undoubtedly an inclination among enduring reporters to give them a harder time. I've learned to be rude, and the good ones have learned not to bother me with trivia. Mistakes go with any job but in reporting, they remain in hard, cold print for all to gloat over. I've misconverted ounces of gold into kilograms and added trite comment to endorse my falsely arrived-at view. I've had gold at R33 000 an ounce and I have quoted someone who knows he said about platinum what I published he said, only not directly into my ear. His complaint to the managing director of this company came in the week when Business Day's editor Ken Owen was appointed to the Sunday Times. I fully expected to get the chop but Owen sought no scapegoat and backed me. I'm now friends with the plaintiff: bygones are soon bygones on a personal level. This is a weekly paper: last week's edition is exactly that. I've worked for three Sunday Times editors and four at Business Times. One, Kevin Davie, was initially reserved until he saw me showing colleagues my home-made stuffed tiger Hobbes (as in Calvin & Hobbes): "You terrorise businessmen yet make furry toys for a hobby!" It broke the ice: he found it hilarious but I wondered whether I did terrorise corporate SA with my pen. Only if they deserve it, I've decided. High on the sins list is excluding the press from meetings with analysts at which shareholder information is given. The companies say they divulge nothing of a price-sensitive nature (or they would be in breach of JSE rules and regulations). So why the secrecy? I had a major bust-up with AECI's PR man on this two years ago. Cheating the minority is another sin I love to expose, and I ignore companies who have done this at some time or another.
Lying, in the annual report, press releases or straight to my face, always gets coverage when discovered. It bothers me that some treat the shareholders' funds as their own. Don't say that the order books are full and prospects rosy when the truth is otherwise, because I might believe it, recommend the shares as a buy and watch the price go south. I really hate to tip a dog. Overseas travel was in short supply until SA began to reclaim world acceptance. Four years ago I went with Safto (SA Foreign Trade Organisation) to India. It yielded a couple of business stories but I also got a chance to watch England play India at cricket in Bombay. This inspired me to write a piece for the Sunday Times sports section: my offering was treated with initial scepticism (a woman writing about cricket?) but after the editor had read it he printed it with a picture of Jonty Rhodes and paid me R200 for it. Clearing that little hurdle gave as much satisfaction as any story I've written. Perhaps one day when I retire and fulfil my ambition of watching cricket around the world full-time, the Sunday Times' sports department will pay me freelance rates.
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