A favorite trope of business writers is to apply the concepts of business reporting to non-traditional businesses, such as churches, schools, organized crime and other places you don't usually see that kind of profit-loss, market strategy type analysis.
Adam Rawnsley of Wired applied the trop yesterday to Somali Pirates, reporting on how they are having a sale on hostages to clear inventory and keep their staff at sea seizing more cargo, esentially a low-price, high-volume strategy.
A group of Somali pirates announced Sunday that they’re cutting their asking prices for hostages by 20 percent — to speed up the negotiation process, make room for more hostages and take in more cash.
“We want to free ships within a short period of time instead of keeping [hostages] for a long time and incurring more expenses in guarding them. We have to free them at a lower ransom so that we can hijack more ships,” Reuters quoted one pirate spokesman as saying.
As the folks over at TVTropes.com note, not all tropes or bad. These types of stories make you think about the form of a business story and what makes it work.
Comments