how to do a story?
If you are a journalist life has become easy these days. All you have to do is to find One incident and do a big story. I mean the story of N Sundaresha Subramanian in DNA Money done on April 02, 2009. It is a story on how Birla Mutual Fund (the Amc) is bending backwards to be the No.3 in the Amc ranking.
It is a negative story so it is easy to carry – and people will read.
I belong to the old school of journalism – we actually thought we had to do our home work, read, talk to amcs, distributors, SEbi, banks, employees and collect stuff. Then we had to find a pattern. Let me take an example. I have been told by 3 alert clients about the ‘true to label’ investing mistakes by 3 fund houses. Is it enough to do a story saying the ‘label should be ignored’ or even better ‘the label is a fable’ ? The answer is yes, of course. However the correct way is to do a review of 20-30 schemes and then say ‘A’ fund house is doing it, ‘B’ had done in the past, …etc.
Similarly if there is a story on throwing money at distributors – this story misses it. This is a ‘personal’ – ‘khunnas’ kind of story. Sorry SS story should be on topics, not people – even if it some easy sitting duck like Pankaj Razdan or Ajay Srinivasan. You should have done research on money being thrown by other AMCs – even the ‘holier than thou’ ones are doing it. Why are we fooling ourselves into believing that only PR and AS are doing it? Ask the distributors – you have a bigger story waiting.
Post Footer automatically generated by Add Post Footer Plugin for wordpress.
One financial story that the press continuously carries is ‘mutual funds are cheaper than ulips’. One amazing program i saw on Ndtv profit was showing how entry loads can have an impact on investments. They showed one investment (one-time i think) and they had different loads – from 2% to 40%!! Now there is no product which is a SINGLE premium and having a 40% load – but poisoning the minds these 2 brilliant ladies – Manisha Natrajan and Monika Halan have done very well in their program. I always thought of television as a dumb medium to learn from, but anchors are much more dumber….