Business & Financial Journalism Intern

Company results are announced through statutory filings that anyone can read, yet most coverage relies on the company's own summary.

Reading the filing itself is what separates business reporting from press release rewriting.

This task is entirely desk based.

Select one listed company and download its most recent quarterly results filing from the stock exchange website or the company's investor relations page, where these are published freely.

Read the actual filing rather than any coverage of it.

Work through the revenue and profit figures, the segment breakdown, the margin movement, and the notes, where the significant information is frequently located.

Build a comparison table setting the current quarter against the same quarter a year earlier and against the preceding quarter.

Year on year comparison matters because many businesses are seasonal.

Now examine the presentation.

Companies emphasise favourable measures and bury unfavourable ones.

Identify what the headline summary leads with and what it mentions only in the notes.

Check whether any figure is presented on an adjusted basis and find what the adjustments exclude.

Research the context using the previous two quarters, sector conditions, and any guidance the company gave earlier that can now be tested against outcomes.

Write a 600 to 700 word news report leading with what actually changed and why it matters.

Explain every financial term in plain language.

Include the comparison table.

Read the notes to the accounts carefully, since this is where the material information usually sits.

Related party transactions, contingent liabilities, changes in accounting treatment, and auditor observations all appear there rather than in the headline figures, and a business reporter who skips the notes misses most of what matters.

Then check the earlier promises.

Find what the company said in its previous two quarterly statements about expected performance, and compare those statements against what has now been reported.

Holding a company to its own earlier forecasts is among the most useful things business journalism does.

Also explain the figure that matters most for ordinary readers, whether that is employment, prices, or service changes, rather than writing only for investors.

Submit the report, the comparison table, the notes analysis, the guidance comparison, a note on what the summary de-emphasised, and the filing link.

Individual company stories make more sense against the sector they sit in, since a company declining while its sector grows is a different story from one declining alongside everyone else.

Building that view is research work done entirely online.

Choose one sector with several listed companies, such as retail, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, information technology services, banking, or telecommunications.

Select five companies in that sector and gather comparable financial data for each from their public filings, covering at least the last four quarters.

Collect revenue, profit, margin, and any sector specific operational measure.

Build a comparison spreadsheet, ensuring the figures genuinely compare.

Different companies classify items differently, so check definitions rather than assuming alignment, and record any adjustment you make.

Now analyse.

Identify who is growing and who is not, how margins differ and why, whether the whole sector moves together or individual companies diverge, and which company is gaining ground on the others.

Research the forces acting on the sector using regulatory filings, industry association material, and published analysis.

Identify the main pressures, such as input costs, regulation, demand shifts, technological change, or new competition.

Write a sector brief of about 1000 words covering the current position, the comparison between companies, the pressures, and what to watch next.

Include two charts.

Watch for the comparability trap.

Companies within a sector often define their own measures differently, report over different financial periods, or include different businesses within the same segment label.

Document every such difference you find and state plainly where a direct comparison is not actually valid, rather than presenting figures side by side as though they match.

Then identify the sector specific measure that matters most, whether that is occupancy, order book, subscriber numbers, or capacity utilisation, and explain why it tells you more than revenue alone.

Also examine what the companies themselves say about the sector in their filings, since their stated views on demand and competition can be compared against each other and against the figures.

Finally, write a short section on what would have to change for the current sector position to reverse.

Submit the spreadsheet, the charts, the brief, the comparability notes, the reversal analysis, and a full source list with links.

Economic indicators are reported constantly and understood rarely.

Explaining one well requires learning how it is actually constructed, including its limitations, and then connecting it to a reader's own life.

This task is entirely research based.

Choose one indicator such as consumer price inflation, the policy interest rate, industrial production, gross domestic product growth, or unemployment.

Study how it is built using the issuing authority's own methodology documents, which are published openly.

Find out what is measured, how the sample is constructed, what weighting is applied, how often it is revised, and what it deliberately excludes.

Collect the actual data series for at least the last three years from the official source and chart it.

Now research the limitations.

Every indicator has known weaknesses, such as a consumption basket that lags real spending patterns or an employment definition that counts differently from common understanding.

Find published critiques from economists and understand what they argue.

Write an explainer of 700 to 800 words.

Open with a concrete household situation the indicator affects.

Explain what the number measures in plain language, how it is calculated, and what the recent trend has been.

Then explain what it means for ordinary decisions such as borrowing, saving, and spending.

Include the limitations honestly, so readers know what the figure cannot tell them.

Include your chart with full sourcing.

Explain the difference between the rate and the level, which is the single most common source of confusion in economic reporting.

Falling inflation does not mean falling prices, and a slowing growth rate does not mean the economy is shrinking, yet both are routinely misread.

Address this directly in plain language.

Then handle revisions honestly.

Most indicators are revised after first publication, sometimes substantially.

Find at least one instance where your indicator was revised and explain what that means for how much weight a reader should place on the first release.

Also compare the official figure against lived experience, since people frequently find that a reported inflation rate does not match what they observe in their own spending, and the explanation for that gap is itself worth writing.

Submit the explainer, the data series, the chart, the revision analysis, and a methodology note with all official sources linked.

Understanding how a business actually earns its money is the foundation of business journalism, and it is frequently different from what the company's marketing suggests.

This analysis uses only public filings and published material.

Choose one listed company whose business you find genuinely interesting and which publishes detailed segment information.

Research its model from the filings.

Identify every revenue stream and what proportion each contributes.

Find the cost structure, separating fixed from variable costs.

Establish which segment generates the profit, which is frequently not the one generating the most revenue.

Now map the dependencies.

Identify the company's reliance on particular customers, suppliers, geographies, regulatory permissions, or single products.

Concentration in any of these is where fragility sits.

Research the competitive position using the filings of two competitors, and establish what this company does that others cannot easily copy.

Then examine the risks.

Listed companies are required to disclose risk factors in their annual reports.

Read these properly rather than dismissing them as boilerplate, and identify the three that are genuinely specific to this business.

Write an analysis of about 900 words explaining how the company makes money, where the profit actually comes from, what it depends on, and what would have to change for the model to stop working.

Trace how the money actually moves through the business, from the customer paying to the profit being recorded.

Identify who the paying customer really is, which is not always the user, and note where a business is funded by someone other than the person receiving the service.

Then examine the growth story the company tells and test it against the figures.

Companies describe themselves in terms of their most promising segment even when that segment is small and loss making, while the profit comes from an older business they prefer not to discuss.

Establish whether this is the case here.

Also look at the cash position rather than profit alone, since a business can report profit while running short of cash, and the difference between the two is frequently where the real story is.

Submit the analysis, a revenue and cost breakdown table, the money flow description, the growth claim assessment, and a complete source list with links to every filing used.