Engaging Mascott means Matt Scott – a former Guardian and Telegraph staff investigative journalist whose daily column covered finance, politics, law and governance.

In business, the stories you tell – and the stories told about you – matter. Blue-chip companies retain Mascott while the narrative is still theirs to control.

Analysis. Scepticism. Lateral thinking.

Mascott roots for you.

No serious company would ship a product untested. Most still put their reputation out in the world that way. A Mascott audit asks the questions a journalist would ask.

How would your company answer a regulatory investigation?
Where do the defamation risks sit?
What happens, in public, if data goes missing?

With Mascott, you close the gaps before they are exposed.

I was at the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing when I heard these words, speaking to a well-known individual in the sports space who had set up a successful communications consultancy.

The conversation had begun because, although I had reached the top of newspaper journalism with my daily Digger column in The Guardian, I was of the view that the press game might not hold the long-term future I once thought it would. Did he have any jobs?

No. “You’re just a journalist, Matt.”

Those words have stayed with me for the best part of 20 years. And they provoke the question: just what is “a journalist”?

The answer is that a good one has more skills than my old contact understood. First, a journalist is a stakeholder manager, capable of maintaining a network of hundreds or thousands of contacts who will yield information to them.

They have a keen instinct for what is relevant, that “news sense” that tells them what it is people generally want to know about. And they have both the confidence and the clarity of thought to ask the questions that deliver that information.

Some even have a broad range of core competencies – an ability to read a report and accounts, to comprehend and analyse data, to be conversant with legalese and technical jargon and to identify developing trends in politics, business, finance and technology.

The best are lateral thinkers, keen to “take the story on” with a new angle that no one else will have thought of.

Finally, they are a strong communicator, able to garner and distil information into its most salient points. Then they can retain and reproduce that information in concise, compelling narratives for written or audiovisual content that speak to their audiences, coupled with a catchy headline and intro.

All of this maps onto the core needs of the modern business world. As more and more content is produced, often by artificial intelligence (AI), the need to generate cut-through is greater than ever.

That means engaging an effective stakeholder manager and lateral thinker with a good news sense, who “gets” the jargon and who can communicate difficult concepts in strong, compelling terms.

In short, just a journalist.