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.
Facebook’s initial public offering made lots of news last week. But one story that stood out to me was a Planet Money segment by Zoe Chace and Steve Henn of NPR. They focus on Facebook’s advertising and how it converts Facebook fans to buyers. But they do it with a twist.
With the Facebook IPO finally behind us, it looks like another Silicon Valley company will be dominating the headlines this week. Unfortunately, instead of instant millionaires, the storyline will feature job seekers if tech giant Hewlett-Packard indeed lays off up to 30,000 workers, as the Wall Street Journal first reported Thursday. If it plays out, [...]
Victoria Lim visited Haiti after the earthquakes to report a sports story, but found the devastating damage to the country shouldn’t be shared in just words. The experienced multiplatform journalist turned instead to photography and voice recordings to detail a man’s quest to establish a soccer academy and foundation for children in a shattered city. [...]
President Obama the other day proposed a new tax credit to reward small businesses that are hiring or giving raises to existing workers. As this New York Times post explains, the company would get 10 percent of any payroll boost back as a credit against taxes, up to $500,000. The news prompted me to wonder about the [...]
Four previous Barlett & Steele Award winners are nominated for a 2012 Gerald Loeb Award, in addition to a Reynolds Center staff member and presenter. The Loeb Awards, presented by the UCLA Anderson School of Management, honor distinguished business and financial journalism. The winners will be announced at an awards dinner on June 26 in [...]
Charles Piller and Robert Lewis are among this year’s finalists for the Gerald Loeb awards for their Sacramento Bee stories exploring hard money lending. The first of their two stories starts with a district attorney who borrowed from a hard money broker, which the story defines as the equivalent of a “legal loan shark who [...]
A local independent pet store that’s been around for years recently started advertising a courtesy home-delivery service. When I inquired about it, I got the sense that it was an effort to combat competition from online shopping services. That was a light-bulb moment, and indeed in checking Amazon, I found my dogs’ preferred brand for [...]
By Jonathan Lansner In the day-to-day grind that is modern journalism – hour-to-hour for more than a few – we get caught up on various reporting or production habits that get us through a day, week or month. However, these rituals – from what sources we use to how we frame our work – can [...]
By Jonathan Lansner Like any other industry, real estate has its own lingo. Here’s a brief slice of the vocabulary needed to succeed in covering this beat. Adjustable-rate mortgage: Interest rate and the resulting monthly house payments of these “ARM” home loans vary over time. Some ARMs offer teaser rates with initial, discounted payments. It [...]
