The quiet disappearance of business in the news

One of the more striking media trends of recent years is not just how political the news agenda has become, but what it has displaced. Reporting this week in City A.M. on the London Stock Exchange cancelling many of its FT subscriptions showed that over the past decade, coverage of major UK-listed companies in the paper has fallen by as much as 70 per cent, while political reporting has expanded sharply. That shift is not accidental. It reflects where power, risk and attention now sit. The paper that once set the agenda for markets increasingly mirrors a world in which politics does the heavy lifting in shaping business outcomes.

While it’s true that there has been a long transition to the world’s most interesting companies being listed elsewhere than London, this is not about editorial neglect or nostalgia. It is about the all-encompassing nature of the modern political environment, which increasingly sucks the oxygen out of the wider news agenda. As a result, there is simply less space for business to be seen, understood and debated on its own terms. The political sphere is no longer the backdrop to commercial decision-making – it is the operating environment.

It is possible to argue this shift is demand-led: the result of a more international readership, the rise of private markets, and the gravitational pull of politics itself. Those explanations have merit. But they all point to the same consequence. As sustained coverage of UK business thins out, politicians are exposed to far fewer business perspectives by default. That makes it easier for policy to be made about business rather than with it – and harder for commercial realities to cut through unless they are argued for directly.

Either way, the implication for business is stark. If politicians now see less business coverage, companies cannot rely on it to do the advocacy for them. Getting a message across increasingly requires direct political engagement: shaping policy debates, building coalitions and making the public case for growth in political, not just commercial, language. In practice, that means doubling down on political engagement, or leaving policy to be shaped without meaningful business input.

It also means finding new ways to tell their story - whether that’s on LinkedIn (increasingly home to the politicians as well) and other digital channels or creative new approaches to news outlets that cover business differently. Exclusives, C-suite interviews and consumer impact are all important things to consider. Almost all businesses have a story to tell: the trick is finding the right way.