why do it at all

A few years ago, The Guardian made a bold decision and brought its financial pages forward, ahead of the comment and opinion section. However, few other newspapers followed suit and for most – other than the Financial Times - the financial pages are stuck, unloved, at the back, like an embarrassing relative at a big family occasion. For tabloid papers, such as the Mail and the Express, even finding the finance coverage is a significant task. (That said, the Mail on Sunday's financial coverage is surprisingly good, and of its rivals is probably second only to the Sunday Times in the range and detail of its output.)

However, where newspapers place their stories is usually not a good indicator of their wider importance. Finance rarely generates a good front page splash, in journalism speak. Partly this is because financial stories are almost always complex and technical, partly because it is so difficult to inject human interest and scandal into them.

Newspapers that do try to go big on a financial story can end up with burnt fingers. A memorable - and probably worthy - attempt by The Guardian to tell the story of corporate taxation backfired rather spectacularly when it made several inaccurate accusations against Tesco relating to tax avoidance.

Overall, the paper wanted to show how big corporations in the UK dream up highly complex schemes to cut their tax burden, usually in partnership with the big accountancy firms. With these types of stories the devil is truly in the detail, and if you try to take on the big names - ie those your readers will actually have heard of - then these are exactly the same companies who have sufficient money to defend their reputation loudly and aggressively.

So every detail has to be right, and the conclusions have to be precisely in line with the evidence. So when The Guardian ran the headline: "Tesco's £1bn tax avoiding plan", the story had to back this up 110%. Unfortunately for the newspaper, the story didn't. It went some of the way there, but not enough. As a result, Tesco did what any large company would do after such a major challenge to its reputation: made a huge legal complaint and forced a front page apology from The Guardian, and a near-complete retraction (or a "revised assessment", in the words of its media commentator Roy Greenslade).

I remember speaking with a Guardian journalist about the Tesco story a few months after the newspaper made its apology. The journalist - not one that worked on the piece - said the Tesco story hadn’t put the paper off digging into corporate affairs that others might not like, and anyway the story had been ‘basically right’, but for a few technicalities.

This latter idea was a worrying thing to claim. The Tesco story led to the Guardian issuing a front page apology, printing that "revised assessment", and cost the paper vast amounts of money. For a journalist, a 'basically right' story that would bankrupt all but the largest newspaper is not right at all.

It is not just the economics though. A story that is partly wrong, even if that part makes up a relatively small percentage of the article, is still wrong. A 70% right story should never get anywhere near the pages of any newspaper; its only destination is back with the journalist that wrote it with a note attached saying: 'confirm sources and details'. Unfortunately, we will meet the 70% story on these pages time and again.