Question someone asked:

Hi! I have a quick question for you re: your job. Next monday I'll start training for a job in the business section of a newspaper (not in the US) and in an interview, my future job (if all goes well) asked me how much should a stock exchange fall be to be considered newsworthy. What would you respond to that? I preferred to tell him I didn't know instead of pulling a number from... a dark place but I immediately though I should ask you (strange how blogging does that). Thank you.

The answer is... it depends! If the fall is sudden and surprising, or there is something interesting about the fall itself (e.g., did it occur in the last 10 minutes of trading? Was it due to a technical or human error?) and especially if it occurs on a slow news day, then even a 1% fall might be newsworthy.

And sometimes, even a big fall is NOT so newsworthy. I used to cover the Japanese stock market back in 2001 when the Nikkei average was bumping down to two-decade lows, and big falls weren't newsworthy at all -- we only noticed really, really big falls. And nowadays, the market in Shanghai rises and falls so sharply that I don't even blink unless it's 4 or 5%.

Wires tend to send headlines whenever a market is down or up any increment of one hundred ("Dow down 300 points," etc.). I've never worked for the wire that sounds a little bit like Bloomingdale's, but I've heard they have their own rules about what falls are considered newsworthy.

In fact, I would guess most places do. Most places have their own rules, and then also have exceptions to their rules.

That probably wasn't very helpful, but I love answering questions like that.

I also love (non sequitur alert!) my site meter.

Thanks to my site meter, I know that someone found my blog today searching, "how many cookies to buy for a memorial service."

But I also know that I still get waaaaaaaay too many inquiries on how to kill rodents.