Bank failure coverage

By Rebecca McClay on Nov 10, 2009 in Beats, Best Practices, Tools

With more banks failing this year than anytime in the past decade, business journalists across the country have had plenty of opportunities to digest the story to a local level.

As of last week, 120 banks had failed in 2009, the highest number since the savings and loan crisis in 1992. Here’s a look at some of they ways newspapers from Maryland to California have been covering bank failures in their areas in 2009.

The Baltimore Sun offered a trilogy of articles on the failure of Bradford Bank in Towson on August 28. Reporters Hannah Cho and Andrea Walker recapped how the bank suffered in the wake of the real estate market, falling victim to bad loans. The nine Bradford branches in Maryland reopened as M&T branches following an FDIC takeover.

The next day, reporter Brent Jones added a personal edge to the story by focusing on one woman who wanted to open an account there, only to find the bank closed. A third article by Eileen Ambrose explained how to check if your own bank was safe.

In San Francisco, where Pacific National Bank and The United Commercial bank closed on Nov. 6, the San Francisco Chronicle folded their local closures into broader stories of bank failures across the country.

For journalists covering banks, great tools are BankTracker, run by MSNBC.com and American University’s journalism program, and the FDIC’s search tool.

About the Author

Rebecca L. McClay is managing editor of www.creditunions.com and a contributor to Trefis, a financial analysis website. She recently interned for MarketWatch in San Francisco and Bloomberg in New York and was previously a business writer at The Gazette of Business & Politics in Maryland. She has been published in The Arizona Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Baltimore Sun and more. Rebecca has been contributing articles to businessjournalism.org since 2009.