A Conversation with Mark McSherry
This month, we had the privilege of interviewing Mark McSherry, a seasoned financial news publisher, editor, and reporter who has held significant roles at renowned news organizations including Bloomberg and Reuters. Currently, Mark runs his own news websites including the Scottish Financial Review, Northern Financial Review, and Euro Financial Review—and imparts his extensive media and journalism wisdom as a college professor at numerous NYC media schools.
What advice would you give to companies looking to garner the attention of financial journalists?
The golden rule is you need to have a story; you need to have what we call a “news sense.” Also, avoid jargon. So many press releases don't get covered because they're using acronyms and jargon assuming that reporters know what they’re talking about. It’s hard enough to communicate in plain English sometimes. Einstein said, “If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” So, you need to know what makes a story and you need to be able to explain it simply.
There's a great paper by George Orwell called “Politics and the English Language,” and every piece of advice anybody needs about communication is in that paper. It's all about achieving clarity. When you write, what you’re doing is trying to achieve clarity, and if there's any ambiguity, if anybody's in any doubt, or if they're not 100% clear, then you didn't do your job. I think we're all guilty of not achieving clarity sometimes. But the advice Orwell gives us is to use plain, short words. When people say “I want to write. I want to be a writer,” they assume that you have to use big words. The opposite is the case. You need to use short, sharp, concrete words that people understand.
Where do you get the majority of your news?
Where does news come from? That's the first 10 minutes of my journalism class. As a financial journalist, you get a great deal of your information from sec.gov and from RNS (the regulated news service of the London Stock Exchange) as well as press releases. Personally, I get a lot of my news by keeping my eyes and ears open. When you’re travelling by subway, train, plane, etc., your news sense needs to be switched on. You've got to do your own work. But honestly, you'd be surprised how many stories come from reporters having lunch.
Do you think it’s imperative for companies to have a strong social media presence?
It’s very important. Companies should have a clever person in charge of social media. I think the mistake some companies make is, they see social media, and they give it to an intern who may or may not know what they're doing. And that's a big mistake because it’s a serious job. You can reach a lot of people with the right platform. I get a lot of readers because I post on Twitter and I tag everybody. You can boost the performance of your organization if you're clever about the way that you use Twitter and LinkedIn.
In a Global State of the Media report, Cision interviewed more than 3,000 journalists worldwide and found 58% agreed that their #1 priority is ensuring content is accurate. Do you agree with this?
100%, all I care about is accuracy. Some days, I write well, some days, I don't. But all I care about is accuracy. Because, if your information is not accurate, your credibility is shot immediately.
Also, if I'm posting a story about a certain company, I will include a link to their results, to tell the reader look, I'm writing this, but I'm getting it from the company itself. So yes, accuracy is a priority. Especially today where there's so much disinformation, misinformation, and fake news, there's nothing more embarrassing than being wrong.