Recent news that carbon dioxide levels in the air have reached milestone levels (or near-milestone; some numbers were revised) got me to pondering some possible business stories related to the gas itself rather than to the larger and more amorphous topic of climate change. If you need to brush up on your science, here’s the entry [...]
As a financial journalist, I always resented the sports section. After all, we cover the most important stories for individuals and communities, about their jobs, livelihoods and economies. But who gets the biggest budgets and largest number of pages? Sports. On reflection, however, there’s much we can learn from sports. Consider: • It’s about competition, [...]
It’s hard to overlook the buzz created by this week’s revelation by actor and activist Angelina Jolie that she had preemptive surgery to remove both breasts, because she carries a gene that makes cancer likely. News of Jolie’s decision, which she wrote about in a first-person New York Times essay on Tuesday, has generated a great [...]
Wedding season is arriving in many locales. It’s a nice opportunity to get some picturesque small business profiles, personal finance and hospitality stories onto the business pages. And with weddings being among the biggest-ticket items most families spend on, you might find among nuptial trends some interesting economic indicators and other cues to your region’s [...]
The Seattle Times does a comprehensive job of exploring how foreign worker visas affect American workers in the technology field. Reporters Kyung Song and Janet Tu start the story with a recent computer science graduate who struggled to find a job. They write thousands of programmers and engineers have faced the same challenge “despite reports [...]
I’ve been feeling remiss in not writing about the business implications of that the tragic and deadly fire that took place April 24 in a Bangladesh garment factory, and now unfortunately there are reports of another fatal fire at a sweater-making facility there as well. These workplace disasters have prompted a fair amount of discussion in the United [...]
Dozens of journalists teamed up to dig deep on 2.5 million files attached to more than 120,000 offshore companies and trusts. The result: a groundbreaking investigation on offshore secrecy – “Secrecy for Sale: Inside the Global Offshore Money Maze” – from The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ). The series has already gained international attention, [...]
With stock market indices topping records and hitting psychological milestones like “Dow 15,000,” your audiences probably are wondering if it’s finally safe to peek at their 401(k) statements, and what else this bull run means for them. And more to the point, “Can it last?” As CNBC reports, major indices are up by double-digits so far [...]
If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, small-business coverage is the last refuge of cowardly, mediocre newspapers. Did I just write that? Oh, well. My Management Tourette Syndrome, suddenly blurting out the truth in meetings, was why I was repeatedly warned that I would never make admiral of the Cox, Hearst, Scripps-Howard, Gannett [...]
