Today was the first day of a seminar for journalists covering business and economics organized by the Washington-based International Center for Journalists and financed by Statoil Azerbaijan.
Topics covered included the importance and meaning of numbers in business stories, key economic indicators, statistics on GDP, as well as training on professional journalistic standards, such as the difference between the fact and analysis and opinion, balance and fairness, working with the press-release, and using multiple sources in business stories, and a session on key industries, important business stories in country and region.
The seminar will run for two more days and will touch upon the themes of stock exchange, differences between private, state-owned and publicly-owned companies, keys to privatization, foreign investors, writing about regulators and government agencies, interviewing techniques and covering a specialized area (“beat”), using quotes, attributing information to sources, using graphics (pie charts, fever charts, bars and graphs) to tell the numbers stories.