Welcome to the business beat. If you are new to business reporting – relax. Mark W. Tatge, an author, professor and investigative reporter who spent three decades as a journalist, is here to walk you through the basics.
Reading John Fuquay’s piece in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram about AMR Corp.’s pensions gave me flashbacks to my days of covering bankruptcy at Bloomberg News. His article helps readers understand why AMR’s projections of its pension obligations are 42 percent less than the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.’s calculations. Pensions aren’t the easiest topics to decipher, [...]
Even as fallout from the mortgage market meltdown still reverberates throughout the economy, ominous rumblings suggest that a similar bust in the student loan market could be the next big financial crisis. According to a just-out report by the National Association of Consumer Bankrtupcy Attorneys, for example, 80 percent of respondents report a surge in [...]
A story by Raquel Rutledge and Rick Barrett that won the Barlett & Steele Silver Award for 2011 has been selected to be part of the “Best Business Writing 2012,” a book to be published in June by Columbia University Press. Rutledge and Barrett, reporters at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, received the silver award in [...]
Britt Johnsen and Kirsti Marohn of the St. Cloud Times used empty lots to illustrate how the recession stalled new housing developments in a three-part series. Through their reporting, they found their three-county area had 12,000 empty lots. In Avon, a city near St. Cloud, the recession thwarted plans for two developments. In part two, [...]
Bankrupt American Airlines on Wednesday revealed a tough restructuring plan that would scrap the pension plan, reduce health care benefits and, as several of my mobile news smartphone apps trumpted, , lay off some 13,000 employees. That’s a blow to a stumbling jobs market and a hit to consumer and worker confidence, though investors probably love [...]
The Greatest Generation of business journalists will come from today’s university students. A perfect storm of events, technology and globalization has equipped this generation to better understand and effectively report on the world of money than any that preceded it. Its words and visuals for financial issues that matter will also carry faster and further [...]
Arizona’s 100 years in business Arizona turns 100 on Feb. 14 and a team of print and web journalists have been scurrying for months to pull together fun and educational ways to celebrate the event. This crowd-sourced package of photos will interest business journalists … or anyone interested in business or the Southwest. The Arizona [...]
Adam Davidson of NPR’s Planet Money produced an Atlantic article and a two-part segment for Planet Money looking at the loss of jobs for unskilled workers and the growing demand for skilled workers. He explored the issue through Standard Motor Products, a 92-year-old, family-run maker of replacement parts for car engines. In yesterday’s post, Adam offered tips [...]
All that reporting, all those documents, all those late nights. But you finally got that story! Now, how do you get people to read it? In today’s congested media marketplace, storytelling is more important than ever – but too often, it is the neglected element in business journalism.
In this Webinar, you will learn these techniques to tell great stories from Diana B. Henriques, longtime financial writer for The New York Times and the author of the best-seller, “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust.”
