The current financial crisis has been tricky for even veteran business writers. How do you explain difficult concepts like collateralized debt obligations or the London interbank lending rate in language that the now-famous Joe the Plumber will understand?
It’s not easy. But it is possible, as a handful of writers have shown, including some with no previous business reporting experience.
I’ve written before about not needing to be serious to write about serious topics, like the hip hop YouTube video that humorously but succinctly explained the Large Hadron Collider.
Lately, the piece on the financial crisis that I keep hearing people talk about for its elegantly simple take on the whole mess is one that first aired last May on the radio show This American Life called The Giant Pool of Money. Alex Blumberg, a producer at This American Life, and Adam Davidson, a National Public Radio business reporter, got together to explain the connection between fancy new forms of debt like collateralized debt obligations and people losing their homes because they couldn’t pay their mortgages.
It was an instant, and timely, hit. The New York Times has written about the story and the pair, who now have a blog and podcast devoted to writing about the crisis called Planet Money.
Making it easy for readers to understand hard stuff is the kind of thing that’s taught in Journalism 101. But after spending years on a beat you sometimes lose sight of who your readers are and what their grasp of the information is, or isn’t. Roy Peter Clark, a writing instructor with the Poynter Institute, reminded writers of that point in his Writing Tools column this week. He also referred to a column he penned back in 2001 explaining how to make stories on even the driest or most complex subjects “engaging and comprehensive.” Some of his advice:
Tell it to a friend. When you tell your story to a single person, your voice changes and your language becomes more simple and direct.
Think graphics. Informational graphics are reaching new levels of excellence in American newspapers. Our ability to explain complex issues in words and then illustrate them in pictures provides valuable reinforcement for the reader.
Read the entire column here.