Barclays dropped its half-year numbers on Tuesday morning. One filing, thousands of figures. Reuters circled the 17. The Guardian circled the 30. That single choice is the entire story of how business news works. * The Reuters wire version: "Barclays reports 17% profit rise on strong equities trading." Classic earnings-note genre — profits up to £6.1bn, forecasts beaten, the equities desk up 45%, a £1bn buyback for the shareholders. Every word true, every word written for the reader who owns the stock. * The Guardian opened the same PDF and led with a different number: the bonus pool, up nearly 30% — £1.3bn set aside for bankers' bonuses in six months — right as the new government is being pushed to tax banks harder. By mid-morning the Guardian's headline had sharpened again: "Burnham urged to increase tax on banks as Barclays' profits soar." In this version the story isn't whether analysts were beaten. It's who gets what, and who's asked to chip in. * Both numbers are real. Profit grew 17%. The bonus accrual went from £1bn to £1.3bn — growing nearly twice as fast as the profit that supposedly justifies it. The wire genre files that £1.3bn under 'costs' and moves on. The Guardian promoted it to protagonist. * Then comes the quote-off, and it's a beauty. The TUC's Paul Nowak: big banks are "raking it in while working people and local businesses are struggling," and Barclays "can easily afford to pay more tax." Barclays' CFO, on the bonus pool: the increase was "purely mechanistic." One of those phrases gets repeated in a pub tonight. The other was engineered so it never could be. * And here's the detail that tells you even Barclays knew which headline was coming: on the call with journalists, executives arrived pre-armed with lobby-group statistics showing UK banks pay a 46.4% effective tax rate against 27.9% in New York. Nobody brings that spreadsheet to defend a story about strong equities trading. The bank prepared for the Guardian's version, not the wire's. * No villain here, exactly — Reuters wasn't hiding anything, it was serving its customer. It's just worth saying out loud who the customers are: the wire's reader owns the shares. The Guardian's reader owns a mortgage. Every business desk in Britain picked one of those readers on Tuesday morning, and almost none of them wrote the choice down.