‘Business Daily’ must fast retrace its steps and rediscover its purpose

Two days later, on Friday, September 5, 2025, the headline proclaimed that accidents and car theft insurance payouts hit a record Sh44 billion.

Here’s the catch: both stories were mined from a report by the Insurance Regulatory Authority and written by one journalist.

On the surface, they were routine news items. But their dominance on the front page underscored a deeper malaise: the regurgitation of reports and episodic stories are fast becoming routine for the Business Daily.

For a publication that was launched with the lofty ambition of becoming Kenya’s Financial Times, and which has established itself as the go-to paper for business leaders, policymakers and investors, this descent into episodic reporting undermines its logic as a niche newspaper.

Episodic news – single events stripped of context, depth or analyses – may fill pages. But it does little to enlighten a readership that turns to the Business Daily for rigorous interpretation of trends shaping the economy and society.

A niche publication does not exist to report the news; it exists to explain it. Its value is not in speed – a battle long lost to digital platforms and social media – but in depth. Its currency is not information, but insight.

This is the sacred creed of titles like the Financial Times, The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal.

They understand that reporting on business is not about chasing scandals or dressing up reports and press releases as news.

It is about rigour – uncovering trends, interpreting policy and extracting insights from the everyday lives of people and firms. It connects the micro with the macro: how a farmer in Narok responds to fluctuating fertiliser prices; how global shifts in energy affect Kenya’s manufacturing costs; how digital disruption reshapes the informal economy.

The Business Daily has perhaps the finest cadre of business journalists in Kenya. Many of them have honed their craft in markets and newsrooms over the years.

To see their work reduced to publishing repackaged reports or perfunctory coverage of minor events is the greatest disservice editors can do to the reporters and the readership.

Readers of the Business Daily are not casual consumers of news. They are the country’s economic elite – executives, entrepreneurs, policymakers and professionals – people whose decisions shape jobs, investments and national development.

They expect journalism that challenges their thinking, that connects the dots between business, society and governance.

What they need from the Business Daily is something rare: a sober, analytical, forward-looking voice on the economy – a publication that unpacks budgets with clarity, scrutinises industrial policy with rigour and interrogates corporate governance with courage.

A newspaper that explains not just what happened, but why it happened, how it fits into larger trends and what it means for the future. This was once the daily stable of BD – as the paper is popularly known – and it is not too late stem the decline.

The logic of a niche paper is simple: it must serve its sector better than anyone else.

Episodic journalism dilutes that edge. Consider how the Financial Times covers an earnings report – not as a single number, but as a lens into broader corporate strategy, sectoral shifts or global market dynamics.

That is what elevates journalism from mere reporting to insight. Readers come away not just informed, but enlightened.

Kenya’s business environment is dynamic and often turbulent – inflationary pressures, currency fluctuations, climate shocks, digital disruption and shifting geopolitics. These are not episodic issues. They are structural trends that demand constant analyses.

A farmer in Kitale deciding on inputs, an SME weighing credit options, an investor scanning regional markets – all need journalism that helps them make sense of uncertainty. Episodic coverage does the opposite: it obscures complexity by reducing everything to an isolated event.

Editors at the Business Daily face a choice. They can chase the fleeting episodic scoops, or double down on the harder, slower work of explanatory and analytical journalism. One path leads to irrelevance, the other to influence.

The tragedy with this kind of reporting is not just that it insults the reader – it undermines the newspaper itself. A niche publication that fails to honour its covenant with readers will lose them, first to global platforms, then to irrelevance altogether.

A paper that respects its readers’ intelligence, commits to rigour and context, will not just survive; it will thrive as the indispensable lens through which Kenya, and the East African region, makes sense of business, society and government.

The Business Daily has what it takes to be that indispensable voice. What it must shed is the lure of episodic journalism and the comfort of reports and press release stories. Readers expect more.

They deserve more. And the journalists themselves deserve the space and support they need to do what they do best: illuminate the present, interrogate the past and anticipate the future.

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