I took charge of The News' Business pages in May 2024 and entered a fast-paced newsroom from a relatively slow Op-ed desk (although as luck would have it, when I joined Op-ed in 2016, it used to be quite chaotic with last-minute changes to 'dharna' schedule and ever-evolving red lines).
But the utter chaos I saw in the last two years tops everything else. And that chaos was led by a crisis in leadership in a land thousands of miles away. As the COO of a cement company said at a recently held CFO conference in Karachi, businesses face a larger threat from disorganised governance.
I remember the night I gave myself a pat on the back because I was done early. The US stock market had crashed following US President Donald Trump's tariff announcements, and I had comfortably taken that as main story. But minutes before we sent the pages to print, Trump did the unthinkable: he paused his own decision. The market got off the vent and breathed without support. My brain cells that had finally hung the close sign on work mode reactivated. I quickly made the changes and thanked my stars for had the announcement been even half an hour late, my pages would have been compromised.
If someone were to see how interconnected our world is, the Business Pages are the go-to place. During the May 2025 conflict between Pakistan and India, shares of at least two fighter jet makers changed. One, like its product, fell sharply. While the other maintained its command over the skies. During the 12-day war between Iran and Israel, while markets in Pakistan fell because of the possible disruptions in oil supply, Israel's tech-heavy stock market traded as if it was immune to geopolitics. For tech products, the battleground was a platform to display their strength, which in turn made them more valuable. Similarly, when China launched its large language model (LLM) DeepSeek, it was one of America's richest companies Nvidia that took a major hit (it lost nearly $600 billion in market value). And now, the closure of the narrow Strait of Hormuz has upended markets across the world.
Heading the Business Desk is like wearing skates. You either move effortlessly and quickly or risk falling behind. And that's not the toxicity of the workplace, but a sign of an ever-evolving, always-online global economy. Factors that affect markets change abruptly, causing thousands in losses/or in profit, depending on where the lady luck stands. For pages editors, news monitoring with attention to detail is key. And that can only happen when editors also leverage the latest tech tools.
Using tools like Google Trends to see which keyword people are searching for usually provides rare insights into stories. Then, turning to AI agents to search the web for you and compile a list of the latest trends and news reports make the whole news gathering process quite easy. And all of this make it possible for never-appreciated pages editors to compile meaningful stories for readers.
The target audience of The News' Business Pages is diverse. It is a stay-at-home mother who closely monitors gold prices to check if it's the right time to buy something for her children. It is young investors who want to learn how markets behave. It is an accountant student watching how listed companies behaved in certain risk environments. It is an aspiring business owner who wants to learn what CEOs are saying about the business environment. And then there is the usual targets - members of economic chambers, government departments and other financial institutions.
There cannot be a one-size-fits-all rule. There is GenZ, which according to the CEO of a telecom company, wants to do things differently and needs better packaging. They prefer explainers and a tone where newspapers talk to them directly. Then, we have the old-school readers that want the traditional 5Ws and 1H stories first. The pages cannot possibly have an either/or situation and striking a balance becomes the most important task.
And this balance becomes even more essential when commissioning reports on emerging tech. In my career so far, reporting on cryptocurrencies is a challenge. It is a relatively new investment asset with a taint of bad marketing. But the news world does not take no for an answer. Searching for experts and finalising balanced reporting, which is then quoted on LinkedIn, is one of the joys of being associated with the industry.
I have spent nearly a decade at The News and seen how news consumption has changed. But what has not changed (and is unlikely to change no matter how many LLMs are launched) is the importance of factually correct news. I used to think reporting is finite, but the Business Desk has taught me that reporting is an endless loop. All we have to do is keep looking.
-The writer heads the Business Desk at The News and reports on AI, technology and business. She can be reached at: [email protected]
