How should the financial press inform the public?

What constitutes "good" business journalism?

Business reporting requires specialized knowledge about the economy and the industry. It is
more demanding than ‘‘writing about a football game, a school board meeting, a robbery,
new music fad, or a political campaign’’ because journalists must ‘‘understand the
intricacies of the field and write about them in clear, concise, intelligible prose’’ (Welles,
1991, p. xvii).

Challenges of business journalism:

Same economic data may support two disparate interpretations
Relatively few newspapers support highly critical stories or investigative projects against powerful forces (Welles, 1991, pp. xv, xvii).

Journalists are not even good at covering their own industry --

A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH? Examining how newspapers covered the newspaper ‘‘crisis’’

This study examines how the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the New York Times framed the newspaper ‘‘crisis.’’

Newspaper journalists often fail to contextualize their reports with a comprehensive understanding of the economics of the newspaper industry,

They rely too heavily on the views of newspaper publishers and too little on empirical data.

The coverage tended to focus more on personnel numbers (50.7 percent) than key financial indicators such as advertising revenue (34.7 percent), company debts (25 percent), pricing strategies (11.1
percent), or cost structure (10.4 percent).

Coverage focused on short-term drama over long-term trends, lacked sufficient context, shifted blame away from newspapers themselves, invoked ‘‘death’’ imagery, and altogether struggled to capture a holistic portrayal of newspapers’ troubles.

But money matters:
http://www.statesman.com/news/news/opinion/cash-opt-for-transparency/nWFHN/

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/26/business/global/family-of-wen-jiabao-holds-a-hidden-fortune-in-china.html?pagewanted=all