SABEW 2010 blog

Great storytelling, dogged reporting net award for Bloomberg Markets

By Rosland Gammon on Mar 26, 2010 in Best Practices, Featured, Health care, Investigation, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog

David Evans, a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine, noticed that drug companies were repeatedly paying large fines for illegally marketing some of their best-selling drugs “off-label,” or not for the uses for which they had been approved.

Using court records, earnings reports and interviews with former prosecutors, he found that Big Pharma was putting profits before penalties. For example, the $2.3 billion in fines and penalties that Pfizer paid for marketing Bextra and three other drugs off-label amounted to just 14 percent of its $16.8 billion in revenue from selling those medicines from 2001 to 2008.

“Big Pharma’s Crime Spree” recently won one of 13 Best of the Best in Business Awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. The judges commented that Evans did a good job of compiling the history of the drug companies’ fines and criminal activity and commended his “great storytelling, as well as dogged reporting.”

“It captivated me from top to bottom,” one judge said. Here’s the original magazine story, broken into parts one, two and three.

Today’s Tip: Historical reporting requires strong storytelling skills.

“Readers can be nearly paralyzed by compelling stories confidently told,” writes Jill Lepore on the Nieman Foundation’s Web site. “In the hands of a good narrator, readers can be lulled into alternating states of wonder and agreement.”

Writing a cohesive piece like this requires organization and a clear road map. In my classes, I encourage students to use maps for writing to help visually outline the points they want to make and to see the holes in their research. Maps require less effort than an outline. This site has examples of maps you can create to get started.

Jacqui Banaszynski, Missouri’s Knight Chair in Editing, introduced a similar organizational tool in the Webinar she did for the Reynolds Center recently on writing business news for the Web. It’s called the “stakeholder wheel.” In it, news is the hub of the wheel, and the spokes are the primary stakeholders in a story, with secondary stakeholders as the rim.

Feinberg announces cuts to big executive pay

By Courtney Godfrey on Mar 24, 2010 in Basics, Economy, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog

When Kenneth Feinberg addressed the crowd at SABEW’s annual conference Friday afternoon, he said Tuesday he would be a day of big announcements.

Kenneth Feinberg addresses the crowd at the 2010 SABEW Conference

Mum about it during the conference, the administration’s pay czar made headlines Tuesday when he said the top 25 earners at five companies will be paid 15 percent less in 2010 than in 2009 with their cash compensation being cut by a third.

The amended restrictions affect companies still receiving government aid from the bailout fund including General Motors and AIG, according to an Associated Press article.

A Business Week article points out that five of the 119 executives will continue to earn cash salaries of $1 million or more, while the Associated Press highlighted that more than half of the executives will still take home more than $1 million in total compensation.

The Wall Street Journal went heavy into the details yet kept it short with three reporters contributing to the article.

Feinberg told the audience of business journalists this past weekend in Phoenix about a conversation with his 18-year-old son over the executive compensation.

His son, like many in the audience and across the country, was baffled as to why the executives should still be receiving large pays at all.

Many reporters regarded this announcement as his response to the outrage of Americans over executive lucrative pay.

Feinberg said that although some companies have complained that good talent will leave if not paid more, the cuts have been made and they’re not leaving.

CrainsNewYork.com wins SABEW award for broadcast-quality video

By Rosland Gammon on Mar 23, 2010 in Best Practices, Retail | Lifestyle, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, TrendingTopic

Crain's New York Business fashion writer Adrianne Pasquarelli narrates the award-winning "The Making of a NY Dress."

CrainsNewYork.com won one of 13 SABEW Best of the Best in Business Awards Saturday for a three-minute video entitled, “The Making of a NY Dress.”

The segment features Crain’s New York Business fashion reporter Adrianne Pasquarelli showing how designer Nanette Lepore makes 85 percent of her clothing line in New York.

Today’s Tip: Take a cue from broadcast journalists in your multimedia productions.

Too many multimedia pieces are stiff: The reporter reads the print story, and still images flash on the screen.

Don’t be afraid to get in front of the camera. Also, don’t feel like your voice needs to be the dominant voice in the piece. This segment uses broadcast techniques – an interacting reporter, moving images – to tell the story and maintain a fast pace. It also lets the source do most of the narration.

Former WP editor Len Downie: nonprofits critical to future of news

By Linda Austin on Mar 22, 2010 in SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, Small | Private | Non-profit, TrendingTopic

Leonard Downie Jr.

Former Washington Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. said in the final keynote speech of the SABEW Conference that nonprofit news organizations need help to fill the gap left by the downsizing of traditional media organizations. As noted in his recently published report on the reconstruction of American journalism, co-authored with Michael Schudson of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, these fledgling organizations need support from foundations, philanthropists and the government.

|Video and presentation: Len Downie on reconstructing American journalism. [This is not Downie's speech at SABEW, but a similar presentation he gave to an Arizona State University class on April 14, 2010.]

Here’s more on his speech from CUNYatSABEW.com, a site providing coverage of the conference by CUNY journalism students.

Downie is the Weil Family Professor of Journalism at ASU’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, which hosted the conference. He is also is vice president-at-large of The Washington Post.

Video

NYT publisher to media companies: reinvent yourselves

By Linda Austin on Mar 22, 2010 in Career tips, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, TrendingTopic

New York Times Publisher Arthur H. Sulzberger Jr. waits to deliver his keynote speech Saturday at SABEW.

New York Times Publisher Arthur H. Sulzberger Jr. sounded a call for his media company and others to reinvent themselves in a keynote speech at the SABEW Conference. ”Are we being bold enough? Or are we allowing our past experiences to hold us back? he asked. Media companies must push change at the ”cost of cannibalizing parts of our own business.”

He said he had just read a book by Jaron Lanier called, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, about how technology can lock in thought. ”We are brilliant at reporting and analyzing, but we are not as good at applying it to our own businesses,” he said.

Sulzberger said the Times is “trying to understand how digitalization is transforming the very nature of communication today.” In the past, consumers went to news sources to find information. Now, “that information is finding them,” he said.

He discussed why NYTimes.com, which is one of the top five global news and information sites, decided to start charging heavier users in 2011. He said the Times determined that while digital advertising will continue to be a major contributor to revenue, a second online stream “would be an important part of our future.” He also said that the approach the Times took would allow its site to be “a vibrant part of the search-driven Web” and would enable the company to “embrace promising opportunities” on a broad range of end-user devices, such as the iPad, that will charge subscribers for a richer user experience.

Why wait until 2011 to charge? “It will take time to get this right,” noting that home-delivery subscribers need to be assured free access to the site.

He said that the Times was one of the first media companies to set up a research-and-development arm to look into the future and try to develop interesting new models and platforms for the Times’ quality journalism.

“We must continue to discover what we don’t know. We must constantly push ourselves to be better, smarter and more innovative,” he said. “I would encourage you to take tough and courageous positions in your own organizations in this period of relentless change.

“We cannot lament a world gone by.”

Here’s more coverage of Sulzberger’s speech from:

CUNYatSABEW.com on the Wall Street Journal’s challenge to the Times with a New York section launching April 12, and
DailyFinance.com on how “railing against Google is like railing against oxygen.”

Photo editor gives three elements of great business news photos

By Linda Austin on Mar 21, 2010 in Best Practices, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, Tools, TrendingTopic

Photo workshop Reynolds Center SABEW Hsin Cafe

Bloomberg writer David Evans took this photo as part of the Reynolds Center workshop on how to take compelling business news photos.

Carlos Chavez, deputy photo editor for The Arizona Republic, told a Reynolds Center workshop that these three elements are the keys to great business news photos:

Lighting: The best lighting is outdoor lighting on an overcast day. Strong sun creates harsh shadows.
Composition: Follow the rule of thirds. Draw imaginary lines both horizontally and vertically one-third of the way across a photo, and place the most important elements at the intersection of those lines.
Action or moment: “A lot of time your (persuasive) personality is going to make or break your assignment,” he said because many people don’t like to be photographed and you have to coax them into it.

Other tips:

When shooting portraits, if you are getting glare off a subject’s glasses, either move the person to stronger light or have them tilt their glasses down slightly.
You never want the eyes of the subject dead center.
A professional photographer will have no problem getting in your face. Don’t be afraid to get closer.
A wide angle will give more of a scene setter. “When you zoom in, you’re eliminating the background.”
To achieve headshots with a studio look, shoot high and down. The flash needs to be eye level or higher. Have a tall person sit down. The person then looks up and loses his or her double chin, if he or she has one.
Shooting someone straight on makes them look wider. Turn the person to his or her side.
The problem with the red-eye setting on a point-and-shoot camera is that it’s often too slow for fast-moving subjects.
Shoot a lot of photos; a professional news photographer would shoot 100 to 150 photos for a feature on a restaurant and then edit those down to 10 for his or her editor to review. If the subject asks, tell him or her you just want to get a nice shot.
If you get up too close with a wide angle for a headshot, you’ll distort the face.
Don’t crop off the tops of subject’s heads.
When a subject asks, “What do you want me to do?” The answer is “If I weren’t here, what would you be doing?” Tell subjects to pretend that you — the photographer — are invisible.
If you’re using shutter-priority setting, don’t use anything lower than 1/30th of a second. For sports, use 1/250th of a second and higher.
Be aware of the photo’s background, and avoid busy backgrounds.

Carlos Chavez

After classroom instruction, the 13 participants went to nearby small businesses to shoot photos. Chavez critiqued their work when they returned.

The workshop was part of the multimedia track at SABEW’s annual conference in Phoenix, which concluded today. Previous sessions taught participants how to produce a business news video and podcast and how to look natural on air.

Hyperlocal news sites — Main Street Connect — launch March 22

By Linda Austin on Mar 21, 2010 in Basics, Entrepreneurs, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, Tools, TrendingTopic

Carll Tucker talks about his new venture in hyperlocal news sites called Main Street Connect.

Update: By May 20, 2010, Main Street Connect had launched three more community news sites in beta, all in Fairfield County, Conn.: The Daily Westport, The Daily Fairfield and The Daily Darien. It also announced these members of its board of directors: Chairman Peter Georgescu, chairman emeritus of ad giant Young & Rubicam Inc.; Stephen I. Sadove, CEO of Saks Inc.; and financial journalist Jane Bryant Quinn. Quinn is also the editorial director for Main Street Connect and the wife of founding partner Carll Tucker.

Original post: On March 22, Carll Tucker launched the first in Norwalk, Conn., of what he hopes will be 3,000 hyperlocal news sites by 2013.

Tucker, the former editor/publisher of Trader Publications Inc., is the founding partner of Main Street Connect, which describes itself as a national community news company. It will offer franchises to start community news Web sites. He said that franchisees would have to invest $25,000-50,000 and, within 18 months, should have $250,000-500,000 in cash flow. Similar ventures, by both big companies, such as Microsoft with Sidewalk.com, and startups, such as Backfence.com, have yet to crack this market. ”We sell community, not clicks,” Tucker said in differentiating his offering. “There’s nothing on the Web that is a satisfying ad medium for local businesses.”

He spoke on the eve of launch at a panel on entrepreneurial journalism as part of the SABEW Conference at the Cronkite School. Others on the panel were Eric Schurenberg, editorial director for CBS MoneyWatch.com, which he started in six weeks in 2009; Rob Cox, a founder of Breakingviews.com, which started in 2000 and was sold to Thomson Reuters in 2009; and Dan Gillmor, director at ASU’s Cronkite School of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship. The panel was moderated by Warren Watson, executive director of SABEW.

Tucker started his venture after the weekly paper serving his and wife Jane Bryant Quinn’s country home in Beekman, N.Y., went out of business. He saw an opportunity: “Our core reader is a mother of school-aged children; Madison Avenue is having trouble reaching her, and we hope to help them out.” The group’s Web sites will use the URL: “TheDaily(town).com.”

A promotional video described The Daily Norwalk Web site as a combination of a great community newspaper and Facebook: “Beneath this old-fashioned exterior is a high-tech heart.”

He said that his sports editor, recruited from a local newspaper, at first wanted to recruit many people to do extensive coverage of varsity high school sports. Given his target audience of moms, Tucker told him that the first sports that needed to be covered were youth sports and rec sports. “With newspapers, you have a limited amount of space and quite a lot of personnel. Here (online) we have unlimited space and very limited personnel.”

The newspaper industry got into a rut, he said. “The great liberation of a new medium is that you don’t have to do anything anybody tells you.”

Cox attributed the success of Breakingviews.com, which offers financial commentary and analysis in “realish time” to the “global financial elite,” to having excellent content, a good idea that served a market need, financing, supportive shareholders (who were very patient) and good governance. He said the sale to Reuters in December created “a reasonable return to our shareholders.”

Schurenberg said that the video-centric, personal-finance site, CBS MoneyWatch.com, is the network’s experiment in low-cost business reporting. ” We have to operate with a gimlet eye on costs, and everyone is responsible for everything.”

Gillmor said that “the students we have here (at the Cronkite School) are largely going to be inventing their own jobs.” He admitted that it’s “so exciting for them that I’m jealous beyond words.” One reason is that you can go from an idea for an online media venture to doing it in a short time with almost no capital. “You can do 90 percent of the technology from off-the-shelf parts that you bolt together.”

Gillmor said it’s hard for big news companies to innovate because of the desire to protect cash flow — “which is still massive” — by not competing with yourself. “The small stuff – if it doesn’t move the needle in a visible way — they’re not interested.” He noted that his former employer, Knight Ridder — which was purchased by the McClatchy Co. in 2006 — owned the domain name, Headlines.com, since the mid-1990s and never used it to aggregate news headlines.

LAT reporter: Toyota-recall story to turn to regulators’ role

By Linda Austin on Mar 21, 2010 in Investigation, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, Tools, TrendingTopic

Marty Steffens and Ken Bensinger SABEW panel Toyota safety

Missouri SABEW Chair Marty Steffens (left) and Los Angeles Times reporter Ken Bensinger

Ken Bensinger, reporter for the Los Angeles Times on the Toyota sudden-acceleration story, said the safety story will increasingly turn to how the U.S. regulators did.

Bensinger spoke at a panel Sunday on “Toyota’s fall from grace” at the SABEW Conference. Others on the panel were David Bailey, who covers autos for Reuters in Detroit, and Masanori Murui, correspondent for Japan’s Nikkei Newspapers in New York. It was moderated by Marty Steffens, SABEW endowed chair in business journalism at the University of Missouri.

Bensinger noted that Toyota has three former government regulators employed in its Washington offices to negotiate favorable terms with the government on safety issues.

Bensinger also said he had an editor once who told me never to quote plaintiffs’ lawyers or short sellers. “If you follow that advice, no one saw the financial collapse coming. “

He said that what’s happening now with Toyota is “kind of a legal free-for-all.”

Bailey said transcripts and other legal documents will be coming out for years in the cases filed against Toyota that will shed light on a very secretive company. “It’s a gold mine for reporters who take the time to dig into these documents.”

Bensinger said he read through all eight investigations on sudden acceleration in Toyotas from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration since 2003. “If you ever get a chance to read every single document on a topic, that’s preferable,” he said. The issue came into focus like squinting at a 3-D poster.

He also said he and fellow Times reporters did a lot of analysis the old-fashioned way initially, using pencil and paper to write down document numbers. “Only later did our computer guys said there’s an easier way.”

“This is the most intense 18 months any (auto) reporter can imagine….Just when we think we’ve finally been through it all, something pops up,” Bensinger said. The solution: “Sleep less, work more.”

SABEW elects new board members

By Reynolds Staff on Mar 21, 2010 in Basics, Latest, SABEW 2010, SABEW 2010 blog, TrendingTopic

Rob Reuteman

The Society of American Business Editors and Writers chose new board members at its 47th annual conference in Phoenix.

Those re-elected to the board for three-year terms were:

Lisa Gibbs of Money magazine
Kevin Hall of McClatchy Newspapers
Diana Henriques of The New York Times
Chris Peacock of CNNMoney.com
Gary Silverman of the Financial Times
Pamela Yip of the Dallas Morning News

Those elected for one-year terms were:

Mary Jane Pardue of Missouri State University
Alwyn Scott of the Puget Sound Business Journal
Rodney Ward of “Nightly Business Report”

In addition, freelancer Rob Reuteman of Denver succeeded Reuters training editor Greg McCune as president. Kevin Noblet of Dow Jones Newswires moved up to the vice presidency. Becky Bisbee, business editor of The Seattle Times, received a President’s Award from McCune for her 10 years of service on the SABEW board.

Next year’s conference will be held April 9-11 at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, with the 2012 event in Indianapolis.