The Particulars

Instructor: Diana B. Henriques,
longtime financial writer
for The New York Times and
author of the best-seller,
“The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff
and the Death of Trust”

Location: Online

When: Noon and 4 p.m. ET
Aug. 13

Register for this free,
hourlong Webinar.

Photo by flickr user ElvertBarnes

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.

Ask too many business reporters about storytelling, and they’ll say, “Oh, yeah – I have an anecdotal lede.” In fact, great stories are built from the ground up, beginning with reporting techniques that empower you when it’s time to write and moving on to eye-opening tools borrowed from the worlds of screenwriting and suspense fiction.

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.”

Author Diana B. Henriques signs copies of "The Wizard of Lies." Photo by Michel Duarte

Sign up for this free Webinar.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

How to:

• Gather the telling details while chasing the story.
• Deepen your story with universal characters from folklore and myths.
• Use techniques from screenwriting and potboilers to strengthen your writing.

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Diana B. Henriques became a contributing writer to The New York Times in December 2011, after more than two decades at the paper.

As a senior financial writer at The Times, she specialized in investigative reporting on white-collar crime, market regulation and corporate governance. She turned her coverage of Bernie Madoff’s $65 billion Ponzi scheme into a best-selling book, “The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust.”

She was part of a reporting team that was named a Pulitzer finalist in 2003 for its coverage of the aftermath of the Enron scandals. She was also a member of a team that won a 1999 Gerald Loeb Award for covering the near-collapse of  the hedge fund, Long Term Capital Management.

She was a Pulitzer finalist in 2005 for exposing the exploitation of American soldiers by financial services companies. For that series, she also received the George Polk Award, Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Worth Bingham Prize.

FIRST-TIME ATTENDEES

Check out our Technology Help Page for connectivity requirements, helpful tips and an instructional video on how to access Reynolds Center Webinars.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This free Webinar is sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. If you have any questions about the Webinar or the center, please email Executive Director Linda Austin or call 602-496-9187.

The Particulars

Instructor: Tami Luhby,
senior writer, CNNMoney

Location: Online

When: Noon or 4 p.m. ET
July 10

Register for this free,
one-hour Webinar.

Photo by flickr user Saad.Akhtar

Four years into producing stories on unemployment woes, you may be looking for new angles. The good news is that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has a treasure trove of data that offer fresh insights on your local jobs market.

In this hourlong, live session you’ll learn where to find the local statistics to substantiate the trend stories you are seeing  — and find new ones. The Webinar will feature examples of how your colleagues have used BLS data to produce enterprising local stories.

Register for this free Webinar.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

You will learn how to use BLS numbers to find and analyze the following data:

• Unemployment: Dig deeper into the national unemployment figures and find stats on the jobless by age, industry, race and education level.
• Employment sectors: How many people work in leisure/hospitality or finance or in your area, and how has that changed over the past year, five years or 10 years?
• Wages: Find fun facts such as how average weekly wages have changed in your state or metro area. You can search for all employees or specific sectors.
• Hot jobs: What professions are the fastest-growing nationally? How many carpenter jobs will exist in 2018? How many registered nurses?
• Employment population ratio, percentage of population in the workforce: Find out why these two measures can be more telling than just the unemployment rate alone.

Note: You don’t need to have a familiarity with Excel spreadsheets to benefit from this training. However, much BLS data can be downloaded and analyzed in Excel.

Tami Luhby

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Tami Luhby is a senior writer at CNNMoney.com, where she covers the economy. Previously, she covered personal finance for Newsday. Before joining Newsday, she worked at Crain’s New York Business and American Banker. Luhby also teaches at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, from which she graduated in 1997.

FIRST-TIME ATTENDEES

Check out our Technology Help Page for connectivity requirements, helpful tips and an instructional video on how to access Reynolds Center Webinars.

ABOUT THE PROGRAM

This free Webinar is sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. If you have any questions about the Webinar or the center, please email Executive Director Linda Austin or call 602-496-9187.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

• How are private companies structured and how are they different from public companies
• Where to find public information on private companies
• How to produce a better private-company profile

YOUR INSTRUCTOR

Jodi Schneider joined the Washington bureau of Bloomberg News as the team leader and editor for tax policy in fall 2010. Previously, she was a senior editor for American Banker, deputy editor for economics and finance at Congressional Quarterly, an assistant managing editor at U.S. News & World Report, and local business editor at The Washington Post.

She received her bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a master’s degree from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

SELF-GUIDED LESSON

Take a look through the workshop session recording and resources below. At your own pace, you can walk through the self-guided lesson on strategies and tools for covering private companies.

Photo by flickr user Bosc d'Anjou

The four-day Webinar, “Investigating Private Companies and Nonprofits,” took place Jan. 23-26, 2012. | At the bottom of this page, you’ll find links to complete the self-guided training.

“Investigating Private Companies and Nonprofits” was also presented as two separate workshops in 2011 by award-winning experts in the mining and analysis of information on private companies and nonprofits.

AGENDA

Jan. 23: Investigating Private Companies — Finding public information on private companies – Chris Roush

Jan. 24: Investigating Nonprofits — Finding public information on nonprofits and foundations – Roush

Jan. 25: The Hidden World of Nonprofits — Digging into the new Form 990 – Ron Campbell

Jan. 26: How Ready Are You? — A case study on following the paper trail of a private company and nonprofit – Campbell

YOUR INSTRUCTORS

Ronald Campbell is a reporter for The Orange County Register. He started The Register’s program in computer-assisted reporting. He has worked on many investigations, including probes of California’s dependence on immigrant labor, the trade in human body parts, abusive charitable fund-raising tactics and fraudulent stock sales. He’s won the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, as well as awards from the National Education Writers and Investigative Reporters and Editors.

Chris Roush is the founding director of the Carolina Business News Initiative, which provides training for professional journalists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he teaches classes on business and economics reporting. The Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in business journalism was named the Journalism Teacher of the Year for 2009 by the Scripps Howard Foundation and the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, as well as the N.C. Professor of the Year in 2010 by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Council for Advancement and Support of Education.

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN

How to:

• Find public documents on private companies and the basics of what you’ll find in those documents, including the pitfalls
• Understand the new Form 990 and the basics of nonprofits’ finances
• Analyze and apply what you’ve learned to produce great stories

TECHNOLOGY REQUIREMENTS

You can view the PowerPoints by clicking on the links below. To download and print them, you may be asked to sign up for a free account at a third-party vendor, Slideshare, or you can download them as PDFs.

The latest version of Adobe Flash is required to view the Webinar recordings. You can download the latest version of Flash for free here.

David Brancaccio, PBS.

We’ll chat live with David Brancaccio, a special correspondent for Marketplace’s Economy 4.0 and host of the Marketplace Index, on Tuesday, Jan. 31, from 11:30 a.m-12:15 p.m. ET.

Brancaccio, a broadcaster for 33 years, was previously the anchor of public television’s NOW, an award-winning newsmagazine of investigative reporting and in-depth interviews. He also hosted California Connected.

Before joining PBS, Brancaccio was a Marketplace’s European correspondent based in London. He hosted the public radio program from 1993 to 2003. Among his beats: politics, human rights, national security, the environment, health care, and science policy.

From his Marketplace biography:

“Brancaccio specializes in telling stories important to our economy and our democracy through the eyes of the real people who live in the cross hairs of crucial issues. His accessible yet authoritative approach to investigative reporting and in-depth interviewing earned his work the highest honors in broadcast journalism, including the Peabody, the Columbia-duPont, the Emmy, and the Walter Cronkite awards.

A new version of Brancaccio’s public television special about Main Street as an engine of economic innovation called “Fixing the Future” will soon be a feature-length documentary.  He is author of a book about Americans applying their personal values to their money, entitled “Squandering Aimlessly.”

Brancaccio has a bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and a master’s degree in journalism from Stanford University.  He has appeared on CNBC, MSNBC, and BBC television and his newspaper work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the BaltimoreSun, and Britain’s The Guardian.”

Tuesday’s chat will be on CoverItLive.  You can register below and we’ll send you a reminder as the time nears.

Come back on Tuesday with questions for Brancaccio.

The competition is open to full-time journalists who want to attend the center’s free training before and during the conference, as well as other sessions. The center will present the following free training:

• Be a Better Business Watchdog — CAR for Business Journalists, a daylong, pre-conference workshop on March 15.
• How Not to Be Bamboozled by Local Economic Studies by Duke University Knight Chair Sarah Cohen on March 16.

To apply for a fellowship, please email by 11:59 p.m. PT Feb. 8 the following to Reynolds Executive Director Linda Austin, with “SABEW Fellowship” in the subject line:

• Name, position, media outlet (if affiliated with one), email address, phone number.
• A resume.
• A 500-word statement on how attending the Reynolds Center training sessions and the rest of the SABEW Conference would benefit your professional development. Please include in this statement how many times you have attended SABEW previously, whether you would be able to attend this year without this support, and what your plan is for sharing what you would learn with colleagues.

Winners of Reynolds Center fellowships will be notified by Feb. 15.

SABEW will be posting other conference scholarship opportunities on its website soon.

As an experienced radio journalist, Nici offers tips of how radio reporters can produce high-quality stories.

PROFESSORS SEMINARS

The business journalism professors discussed editors’ expectations and how to prepare students for the job market with Linda Austin, executive director of the Reynolds Center; Ilana Lowery of Phoenix Business Journal; Kathy Tulumello of The Arizona Republic; and Jodi Schneider of Bloomberg News.

Session Recordings

• What Editors Expect (panel discussion moderated by Andrew Leckey)
• Preparing for the Job Market — Schneider

Handout (PDF)

• Preparing for the Job Market – Schneider

STRICTLY FINANCIALS

The Strictly Financials Seminar fellows, who are professional journalists, studied financial markets with Gary Trennepohl of Oklahoma State University-Tulsa.

Session Recordings

• Financial Markets in 2012: Where are the Stories?
• Financial Markets in 2012: Where are the Stories? (continued)

Getting LinkedIn: Exploring LinkedIn for Business Journalists

PROFESSORS SEMINARS

The business journalism professors studied financial statements and common-size analysis with Jimmy Gentry of the University of Kansas.

Session Recordings

• Financial Statements I
• Financial Statements I and Securities and Exchange Commission Filings
• Financial Statements II
• Financial Statements II and Tools for Analysis: Common-size Analysis

Handouts (PDFs)

• Crocs – Financial Statements
• Kellogg – Financial Statements

STRICTLY FINANCIALS

The Strictly Financials Seminar fellows, who are professional journalists, studied financial statements and investments with Gary Trennepohl of Oklahoma State University-Tulsa.

Session Recordings

• Decoding Financial Statements
• Decoding Financial Statements (continued)
• Investing in a Time of Uncertainty

Handout (PDF)

• General Mills Financial Statements

Before joining academia, Leoro was the editor of LIDERES, a business magazine in Ecuado. She is also the author of “International Protection for Refugees: Historic Perspective from 1976-2004 in  Ecuador” and continues to work as a freelance reporter.