Chris Wienandt, business copy chief for the Dallas Morning News, made an impassioned plea today to attendees of the national conference of the American Copy Editors Society:
“You see a quote [in a business story] from a company executive. Paraphrase it. Ask yourself: ‘If it weren’t from this company executive, is this material you would put in the story?’”
Before Rich Holden became the executive director of the Dow Jones News Fund, he spent 20 years editing copy at The Wall Street Journal and The Asian Wall Street Journal. So when it comes to mistakes with numbers in stories, he has pretty much seen them all. In the session, “Afraid of Math? Take a [...]
Understand economics inside and out.
That was University of Missouri Professor Marty Steffens’ advice to copy editors attending the 15th National Conference of the American Copy Editors Society in Phoenix.
“Economics is the most important political football right now,” Steffens said.
Bloomberg News took 20 awards, followed by 10 for GlobalPost and eight for The New York Times in the Best in Business contest administered by the Society of American Business Writers and Editors (SABEW). In all, SABEW announced 168 winners, who will be honored at the group’s conference in Dallas on April 9. The best [...]
Newsroom budgets don’t allow for a lot of conference attendance these days, but thanks to social media and blogging, you can get a lot out of South by Southwest Interactive from afar. This year’s panels provided a great overview of where content is headed, but I was really excited to see that much of what [...]
In echoes of the dot-com boom that captivated investors and onlookers a decade or so ago, Bloomberg on Thursday broke news that daily deals site Groupon may be mulling a whopping $25 billion IPO. The irony of a site for bargain hunters – some 70 million, according to Bloomberg – raising that much capital in [...]
I took a senior-level economics course my sophomore year in college. I was in over my head and too proud to admit it. Luckily, I had a great professor with a knack for “dumbing down” the information without making us feel like dummies.
Paul Kiel’s ProPublica article about the new rules for banks and mortgage servicers regarding foreclosures does the same.
A number of interesting industry reports this week were overshadowed, understandably, by the catastrophe in Japan and other world events. One sector you might want to revisit soon, however, is the construction industry. This spring season, typically a time for accelerated activity in housing and commercial building, offers a natural peg for taking a look [...]
The Society of Professional Journalists has just awarded Utah’s governor and legislature its Black Hole Award for “plunging their state into an abyss of secrecy never before seen in modern times” because of recent changes to its open records law. So we’ll see if its residents will get any more stories like the piece last year by John Daley and Lisa Riley Roche of KSL-TV 5 in Salt Lake City. They looked at campaign contributions and state contracts to see if donors were getting advantages.
