BusinessJournalism.org Reynolds Center for Business Journalism » Best Practices

Finding right person helps tell story of Miami’s illegal slaughterhouses

Rosland Gammon — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 11:00:17 +0000

Gus Garcia-Roberts with Miami New Times was a first-place winner in the Association of Food Journalists competition for his article about illegal slaughterhouses. His article starts with a man named Rafael, who goes shopping to get a pig to roast for his 57^th birthday. Gus writes:

“Today’s shopping trip is light years from kosher — and a good trek from the realm of the legal. Miguel [a worker] violated environmental, health, and animal cruelty laws. But it’s business as usual at the tiny, often filthy farms of rural West Dade, where Cubans and other immigrants keep alive a cottage industry of unlicensed slaughter.

But please don’t bother the birthday boy with your wimpy health qualms. ‘Dude, I just picked a pig that I saw was healthy — running around and frisky and all that — watched her be killed and watched her be cleaned,’ Rafael says impatiently as he heads home along Okeechobee Road. ‘How could it be safer than that? If you’d rather eat Hormel or something, go ahead.’”

Today’s Tip: “First find and get to know the real people involved, so you’re not just aiming your pen at a concept,” Gus says.

Gus Garcia-Roberts

He says he found Rafael by asking co-workers and friends if they knew any Cubans who were big Noche Bueno, or Christmas Eve, revelers, who might be buying pigs to roast.

Gus said he also wanted to avoid writing the story from a judgmental illegal-pork-is-bad perspective by focusing on police reports or government sources.

“As a reporter, it’s more fun anyway to smoke out (sorry) the real people who don’t see why there’s even an issue here,” he says.

For more reporting tips from Gus, see this interview with the Association of Alternative Weeklies.

Live chat with personal branding expert Dan Schawbel on Sept. 21

Linda Austin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 17:36:00 +0000

The Particulars
Instructor:Personal branding expert Dan Schawbel

Location: Online
Date and Time: 1:30-2:15 p.m. EDT Sept. 21

Register for this live chat.

Get your questions answered about how best to build your brand as a business journalist during a live chat with personal branding expert Dan Schawbel on Sept. 21.

The author of the book, “Me 2.0: Build a Powerful Brand to Achieve Career Success,” will take your questions online from 1:30 to 2:15 p.m. EDT Sept. 21. To sign up for the live chat, please click here.

Here’s more from his website about Schawbel’s remarkable career since his graduation from Bentley University in 2006:

“‘Me 2.0′ made the New York Times summer reading list for job seekers, was one of three social networking books recommended by Shape Magazine, was the No. 1 career book of 2009 by The New York Post, is a No. 1 bestseller in Japan, and is also being translated into French. Recently, Dan was named to the prestigious Inc. Magazine 30 Under 30 list.

With over 1 million results for his name in Google, 89,000 Twitter followers, and a maxed-out Facebook account (5,000 friends), Fast Company calls Dan a ‘personal branding force of nature.’ BusinessWeek named Dan as one of 20 people entrepreneurs should follow on Twitter, alongside Richard Branson, and Details Magazine cited him as one of five Internet gurus that can make you rich, alongside Seth Godin. He is the founder of the Personal Branding Blog®, which was the No. 1 job blog by CareerBuilder in 2008 & 2009, is an AdAge top 30 marketing blog and is syndicated by Reuters, Forbes, Fox Business and other major networks. Dan is also the publisher of Personal Branding Magazine® and the Student Branding Blog, head judge for the Personal Brand Awards®, director of Personal Branding TV®, and holds live Personal Branding Events. As a brand futurist, Dan was one of the first seven bloggers to have their own iPhone application.

In 2007, Dan co-created one of the first social media positions in a Fortune 200 company, EMC Corp. He is a syndicated columnist for Metro US (New York, Boston & Philadelphia), reaching over 1.2 million readers biweekly. At 26 years old, Dan is the youngest columnist at BusinessWeek.”

If you’d like to send your questions in early, please e-mail them to Robin J. Phillips, Reynolds Center Web managing editor, who will be moderating the text-based chat with Schawbel using CoverItLive on Sept. 21.

Schawbel, who is visiting Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, will also speak in a free, public event at 7 p.m. Sept. 20 at the school in downtown Phoenix. His topic will be “Building Your Own Brand.”

Award winner details soldiers’ deaths in Iraq from unsafe electrical systems

Rosland Gammon — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:00:33 +0000

Tom Zind

: A U.S. Army soldier searches for three missing soldiers in Yusifiyah, Iraq, in 2007 in this photo by The U.S. Army on Flickr.

Freelancer Tom Zind won the 2010 Stephen Barr Award for a 2009 story in Electrical Construction & Maintenance magazine focusing on unsafe electrical systems that have caused noncombat military deaths, injuries and property damage in Iraq. The award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors honors work in business-to-business publications that reflects insight, balance in the presentation of a complex subject, and other factors.

Judges noted the article “synthesizes congressional testimony and original reporting to both document and explain a serious, indeed fatal, problem for the American military in Iraq. The article is written with authority, displaying expert knowledge of the subject, yet it is accessible, vivid and easily understood.”

The story focuses on the deaths of Staff Sgt. Ryan Maseth, who was electrocuted in January 2008 while showering in his Baghdad barracks, and Staff Sgt. Christopher Lee Everett, who was electrocuted while power washing a Humvee in September 2005. Tom writes:

“Their deaths, blamed on improperly grounded electrical systems, have prompted government inquiries into military procedures for addressing noncombat safety issues in Iraq, as well as the competency and reliability of contractors working there. They’ve also unleashed a multi-pronged military effort to identify and fix dangerous electrical problems that could pose a similar threat to troops and civilians quartered in thousands of structures across that country.”

Today’s Tip: Focus on humanizing a story as much as possible, Tom says.

“That’s not a fresh observation, but this story certainly was tailor-made for that because of the tragic deaths of servicemen,” he says in an e-mail. “But I think being able to also highlight in sidebars the stories of the two electricians who were planning to go to Iraq gave the story another human-interest dimension.”

He also suggests engrossing yourself in the subject so that you can understand the issues.

“Map out what you’re going to ask sources based on new information as you come across it, and spend the time, if you have it, to craft the story as clearly and compellingly as possible,” he says.

His last tip: keep reviewing your notes to understand what you’ve learned and what’s important.

“Keep assessing after every interview and new bit of information uncovered, where the story is headed,” he says. “Stories can take sudden twists and turns, and you need to be able to do some course correction as the process unfolds.”

NYT’s Gretchen Morgenson given financial writers’ lifetime achievement award

Robin J Phillips — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 10:00:32 +0000

Gretchen Morgenson, New York Times

New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Gretchen Morgenson is the 2010 winner of the New York Financial Writers’ Association’s Elliott V. Bell Award, honoring an individual’s lifetime contributions to the field of financial journalism.

Morgenson, who is also the Times’ assistant business and financial editor, has covered world financial markets for the Times since 1998. She won the Pultizter in 2002 for coverage of Wall Street. Before joining the Times, Morgenson was at Forbes and Worth magazines. | A collection of Morgenson’s NYT’s Fair Game columns.

The NYFWA’s Elliott V. Bell Award presentation ceremony will be on Oct. 7 at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

The Elliott V. Bell Award is named for the longtime editor of Business Week magazine who was the founding president of the NYFWA in 1938. It is awarded annually to “an outstanding journalist who has made a significant long-term contribution to the profession of financial journalism.”

Recent winners include Allan Sloan, Fortune (2009); Jerry Flint, Forbes (2008), and Diana B. Henriques, New York Times (2007). | A full list of the Elliott V. Bell Award winners.

New York Times financial journalist Gretchen Morgenson talks with Marcia Franklin for Idaho Public Television. The conversation took place at the 2009 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference.

Telling the stories of workers in a down economy

Lindsay Nadrich — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 15:00:12 +0000

A recent story from The New York Times featured workers struggles in a economic downturn.

News outlets have found a variety of ways to tell the story of the millions of unemployed workers struggling across the country.

This week, The New York Times and Reuters highlighted two different angles of the issue: the toll of unemployment wages and how the numbers of out of work Americans has affected the housing market.

An article by The Times, “New Job Means Lower Wages for Many,” humanized the unemployment issue by focusing on two women forced to take lower paying jobs as a result of the economic recession. It was over a year before one woman found employment and both women ended up taking jobs in different fields.

To further highlight the unemployment toll, The Times also featured a video, which followed the challenges faced by two girls who graduated from college in 2008 and haven’t yet found jobs in their field of study. Both girls majored in journalism, but are now working as bartenders to pay the bills. The video follows their routine of job hunting by day and tending bar by night.

By personalizing the issue and utilizing different multimedia components to tell the story, the publication offered its viewers a fresh perspective of the unemployment crisis.

While The New York Times examined how unemployment has affected earnings, Reuters posted an article showing how a lack of workers has impacted the housing market. The article, “Unemployment drives more home sellers to cut price,” focused on how housing prices have fallen due to buyers not being able to meet the higher sale prices.

Both news outlets found interesting ways to tell the stories behind the unemployment numbers and show the scale of the problem. With 14.6 million unemployed Americans as of July 2010, it’s obvious that this is a story with many different angles that will stick around for quite some time.

Checklists and Error Logs – good habits reduce errors

Craig Silverman — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:00:54 +0000

Like people who can’t help asking for health advice from any doctor they meet, journalists who recognize me as the Regret the Error guy usually have two questions on their mind. I view these queries as a reward for spending six years researching, tracking and reporting on press errors and accuracy. First, they want to know the worst media mistake ever (define your criteria, and I can give you an answer); second, they want to know how to prevent factual errors.

The latter is a question I love to get, but the answer is anything but straightforward. That’s why I’m excited to start this every-other-Friday column for the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, and why I don’t worry about running out of material.

That doesn’t mean I can do it on my own. I hope all of you will add comments that share tips and advice for achieving accuracy in business reporting. I hope to combine my knowledge of accuracy and error prevention with the specific expertise of business journalists. It’s going to be a team effort.

I’ll kick things off by sharing three core pieces of an error-prevention strategy. When someone asks me about preventing errors, these are the points I try to rattle off before their eyes glaze over.

Understand The History

Academic researchers have been studying U.S. newspaper accuracy since the 1930s. (Read this paper: Tip of the Iceberg: Published Corrections Represent Less than Two Percent of Factual Errors in Newspapers by leading accuracy researcher Scott Maier to get a sense of the data.) These studies have helped determine the most common mistakes made by newspaper reporters. The below list is a good starting point for determining where you and your colleagues will probably go wrong. These are the top 11 types of factual errors made by U.S. newspapers, in order of frequency:

Misquotes
Incorrect headline
Numerical error
Misspelling
Incorrect job title
Incorrect name
Incorrect location
Incorrect time
Incorrect date
Incorrect address
Incorrect age

Self-Diagnose and Track

Now it’s time to get personal. Grab a pad of paper or open up a document on your computer. Title the pad or document “Error Log” and start listing all the reporting mistakes you’ve made. Chances are that many of them fall into the above categories, but maybe you’ll discover other types of errors that crop up in your work. An Error Log helps you identify your weaknesses and, as a result, predicts the mistakes you’ll make in the future. Mistakes are embarrassing and painful to recall, but they are also the path to accuracy. Create an Error Log, and update it every time you fail.

Create Good Habits

Accuracy is a learned behavior. You can’t take a pill or purchase a piece of software to make yourself more accurate. It takes effort, practice and a willingness to improve your work habits. The key is to map good habits to the errors you make. Now you see why an Error Log is essential. If your Log is filled with misspelled names, it’s time to change the way to you handle this information. One good habit is to start every interview by asking the person to spell his or her name, title and company. Do that every time, and you won’t guess or forget to check it down the line.

Another habit I recommend is adapted from productivity guru David Allen’s Two-Minute Rule: If it will take you two minutes or less to verify a fact, say by sending an e-mail to double-check information, do it right away. Delaying makes it more likely that you’ll forget, or that you’ll do a poor job come deadline. Do it now.

Finally, the single best habit is to use a checklist while reporting, writing and editing. I’ll go into more detail about a checklist for business journalism in a future column; for now, you can download a free accuracy checklist from my site and read about why checklists are so effective.

Now it’s your turn — please share your error-prevention habits and tips in the comments. And here’s a reason to join in: The person who provides the best tip or piece of advice between now and the end of December will win a copy of my book, Regret The Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech.

ProPublica, Planet Money tackle CDOs with comic strip, song

Rosland Gammon — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 11:00:53 +0000

ProPublica’s Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger tackled the very complicated issue of mortgage bonds known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, to show how bankers created fake demand for the once lucrative product. They write:

“An analysis by research firm Thetica Systems, commissioned by ProPublica, shows that in the last years of the boom, CDOs had become the dominant purchaser of key, risky parts of other CDOs, largely replacing real investors like pension funds.”

Jake and Jesse worked with NPR’s Planet Money, which came up with the idea for a song, called “Bankers Song: We Didn’t See It Comin’,” Jake says.

The project also features a comic as a graphic to show how CDOs went into other CDOs, Jake says.

“We searched for metaphors but could never find an exact fit,” he says. “We had toyed with an assembly line to show the CDO process but it quickly became way too complicated. So, we fell into the comic format as a way to show the incentive of the manager to take assets from the bank and the disappearance of investors.”

First Tip: Find creative ways to illustrate a story.

“This topic is extraordinarily complex. Anything like a song or a comic that makes it more accessible, and frankly, more fun, is a most welcome addition,” Jake says.

Second Tip: “Don’t be afraid of complexity.”

Jake Bernstein

Jake suggests:

Talk to as many people as possible.
Don’t take no as the final answer.
Enter every interview willing to learn.
Don’t be afraid to return to your sources a dozen times if necessary to make sure you understand what they are telling you.
Start writing early because once you try and write it out, you’ll really find out whether you understand it or not.

Confronted by mega-ads, WLRN radio reporter thinks locally and nationally

Rosland Gammon — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:00:45 +0000

This screen grab from the Marketplace website shows a billboard in Los Angeles.

Kenny Malone, reporter/producer at radio station WLRN, based at The Miami Herald, noticed big ads appearing on buildings in Dade County. Then he received a press release from a company announcing that a “mural” was going up.

“What caught my eye was how enormous it was,” Kenny says of the 32,000-square-foot vinyl ad.

His segment that aired on American Public Media’s Marketplace says:

“Mike Freedman is CEO of Fuel Outdoor Advertising. They’re the ones renting the side of the [county's] chiller factory. He says everyone wins with the Dade project. Advertisers get unique access; his company gets the contract, and the county gets much needed non-tax revenue.”

Kenny says in the segment that the Apple iPad ad on the chiller building will earn the county a $220,000 rental fee plus 16 percent of the sign’s profits.

Today’s Tip: Think both locally and nationally with your stories, Kenny says.

Kenny Malone

“I’m someone stuck between national and local reporting,” he says. “You have to answer the questions people think of on a national level.”

In this case, he produced a local and a national version of the story. The local version focused on the county effort to raise money by legalizing an increasing number of ads. It addressed the audience’s question of why the ads were springing up.

For the national story, which has the universal angle of municipal governments struggling to make ends meet, he set out to learn what other cities were doing, he says. If you have access to LexisNexis or Factiva through work or a public or college library, those information services can help you find the national context.

“You have to understand a beat doesn’t mean you need to focus on one area,” he says. “It’s about switching the lens on your camera.”

Tax-exempt bonds benefited oil industry more than NOLA neighborhoods

Rosland Gammon — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 11:00:19 +0000

These houses in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans were still abandoned in December 2008, when Flickr user Rain Rannu took this photo.

Ariella Cohen, co-founder and staff reporter at the nonprofit New Orleans news site, The Lens, found that far more of the tax-exempt bonds issued to rebuild Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina went to the oil industry than to hard-hit areas in New Orleans.

In a piece for Newsweek marking the fifth anniversary of the storm, she writes:

“New Orleans has so far received a total of $55 million in bonds shared between eight projects—or less than 1 percent of the more than $5.9 billion issued statewide. None of the bonds issued for New Orleans projects went to development in hard-hit and still-struggling areas like the Lower Ninth Ward.

Instead, the federal largesse has been poured into oil companies operating far from New Orleans. Since Congress’s unanimous approval of the GO [Gulf Opportunity] Zone Act, Louisiana officials have issued nearly $1.7 billion in tax-free bonds—about one third of the total issued — for projects that contribute to the production of oil. Preliminary approval has been secured to tap millions more.”

Today’s Tip: Ask for documentation of how promises were carried out, Ariella says.

Ariella Cohen

She requested Louisiana Bond Commission records to see how much in bonds had been issued. She then imported the data into Excel to sort it. She says she also reviewed commission meeting minutes to see how the money was spent.

Louisiana, West Virginia, and Connecticut are some of the states that post online the minutes of bond commission meetings and other details. More info on municipal bonds issued since 1990 is available at EMMA, a website created by the Municipal Securities Rulemaking Board. EMMA is to munis as EDGAR is to stocks.

Ariella says what surprised her most about the story was that state officials wouldn’t comment.

“No one took me up on that,” she says.

If you’d like to sharpen your skills in using Excel and analyzing data, check out the free “Be a Better Business Watchdog — CAR for Business Journalists” workshops on Oct. 11 in Atlanta and Nov. 9 in Milwaukee. These workshops are co-presented by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and Investigative Reporters and Editors. You do not have to be a member of IRE or have previous database experience to attend.

Also, if you’re looking for more data from the disaster front, IRE just made available for a small fee the Small Business Administration disaster-loan records from fiscal 1980 to 2009. You can search the database of more than 1 million records to find who got SBA disaster loans in your market and who is not paying them back.

Story comments reveal tie between homeless and suicide

Rosland Gammon — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:00:23 +0000

Annie Lowrey of the Washington Independent found a strong correlation between unemployment and suicide. Her story says the rate of suicide among unemployed people is two or three times the national average. The longer the unemployment lasts, the more likely the person will commit suicide.

The article leads with a homeless man’s posting on an online forum, detailing his thoughts of suicide. She quotes the posting as saying:

“This is killing me physically and emotoinally [sic]. I am at the end of my rope and getting to the point of letting go. I have tried everything I know to get help. DHS won’t help’ Salvation Army won’t help. 211 won’t help. I have no idea as to where to go from here. If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow I probably will be dead.”’

She also details how others on the forum tracked him down.

Today’s Tip: Keep a large pool of “sources” in the labor market, Annie says.

These “aren’t really ‘sources’ in any conventional sense. They’re just unemployed folks, progressive activists and union leaders I email with once a week or so, who keep an eye on emerging issues and help me find sources and topics in the labor space,” she says.

Create your own source list as you talk with people. You may not quote them in the story, but you can follow up with them anyway. The best way to find activists is to head to rallies and meetings. Monitoring unemployment from this ground level truly paints a picture of what’s going on.