"It's déjà vu all over again"

Julie Rovner, health policy correspondent for NPR, tackles the debate over health-care reform with a segment looking at the use of scare tactics during past attempts to change the system.

Says [Jonathan Oberlander, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina], "The opponents have changed over time; the tactic of relying on fear and scaring Americans has not."

As did Yogi Berra, Oberlander notes “it’s… déjà vu,” with fear playing a major role in defeating reform efforts in 1915 and in the 1940s and 1990s.

Today’s Tip: Research whether similar events happened before and how today’s news differs. Adding context aids reader understanding.

Matt Thompson created www.columbiatomorrow.com to provide context to the debate over development in Columbia, Mo., while a Reynolds Fellow at the University of Missouri. His post on www.newsless.org, “The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get,” discusses how to grow audience “by making it easier for more people to understand the longstanding facts behind each story.”

Finding that missing jar of marbles

Brigid Schulte of The Washington Post found a different take on the recession: people selling burial plots.

“A friend sent me an e-mail clip of a story of people selling all sorts of things from a Las Vegas paper, including cemetery plots, to make ends meet in the recession, and I began to wonder if things had gotten that bad around here,” Brigid says.

Today’s Tip: Fresh ideas for covering an ongoing story, such as the recession, can be found in unlikely places -- if you’re paying attention.

Brigid started with classified ads and worked her way to online cemetery-plot sellers, she says. Her big challenge was getting plot sellers to talk.

“There was a lot of shame. I was shocked when Debbie Jenkins told me flat out that she was living in an unheated garage and had already lost so much she figured she couldn't lose any more by talking to me,” she says.

Brigid says finding fresh angles on stories starts by just paying attention.
“I once got one of my favorite stories -- of a $10,000 reward offered for a lost jar of marbles that turned out to be a saga of lost love and betrayal -- by reading a bulletin board in an ice cream shop,” she says.

Tweeting for ideas

John Tozzi asked the 1,300+ people who follow BusinessWeek’s small-business staff on Twitter @newentrepreneur for recommendations of entrepreneurs who give good tweets. His list of 20 people every entrepreneur should follow on Twitter contained some names even he didn’t know. (There’s also a handy sidebar about Twitter lingo.)


“Twitter is growing explosively, and it’s increasingly seen as a place where businesses should have a presence. But it’s easy to get lost,” John says. “We thought picking a mix of 20 people who consistently point to interesting ideas and resources for entrepreneurs would be valuable for readers.”

Today’s Tip: Get your readers involved, especially when you’re producing a service piece like this one. Social media sites make doing so a lot easier. Here's a primer on how to use Twitter as a journalist.

“A top-down list just selected by reporters and editors will be weaker than one that considers ideas from outside,” John says. He says several reader suggestions made it to the final list.

The graphic display online is also clever: a slide show showing choice tweets from each of the 20. However, some users commented they found it too slow to click through the slides, and they would have liked a list, presumably with hyperlinks.

[Photo courtesy of BusinessWeek]

Upside down over Marilyn Monroe

Jeff Gottlieb, a senior writer for the Los Angeles Times, discovered the story about a widow selling a crypt above Marilyn Monroe’s from a friend of the seller, Elsie Poncher. That tip led to two stories: the first about the eBay auction and the second about the results.

Today’s Tip: “Indulge your curiosity,” Jeff says.

“I once wrote a story about an Orthodox Jew who refused to give his wife a religious divorce, so she couldn't remarry. I was walking down the street when I spotted the fliers she posted to shame him. I started calling around and came up with one of the most interesting stories I've ever written.”

Jeff says once you find the story, “Have some fun with it, which often is the most natural way to write it.” To do that, you need this kind of killer detail, which Jeff got from asking the right questions of Mrs. Poncher:

When he was dying, Elsie said, her husband approached her with a request. "He said, 'If I croak, if you don't put me upside down over Marilyn, I'll haunt you the rest of my life.' "

Right after the funeral, Elsie said, she told the funeral director of her husband's wish. "I was standing right there, and he turned him over," she said.

Covering the angles

Ashley M. Heher, retail writer for The Associated Press, helps readers understand what’s missing from their mailboxes in her article about the decrease in junk mail. She offers varied sources of information and good data as support.

Today’s Tip: Think about all the parties involved when you’re reporting and seek to provide all those voices.

Ashley’s article has a consumer, big-name catalogers, the U.S. Postal Service and a direct-mail company. When it comes to junk mail, that list about wraps it up. The process works the same way when you’re reporting on health insurance: doctors, hospitals, insured and uninsured patients, large and small employers, free clinics. Stopping to think about the voices you need upfront eliminates the dreaded “Why didn’t you call me?” after publication.

The article would have served readers even better with a link to the Direct Marketing Association’s Web site to opt out (or in) for direct mail.

When the subject won't talk

Ruth Madoff, the wife of the imprisoned Ponzi-scheme operator Bernard Madoff, became the focus of a Vanity Fair article by Mark Seal after she broke her silence by issuing a press release.

Seal uses that statement to provide a voice from Mrs. Madoff. The remainder of the story comes from the approximately 100 people Mark interviewed about her.

Today’s Tip: Sometimes what other people say about the subject of a profile makes a better story.

Mark tracked Ruth Madoff’s life back to age 14 and even found a high school classmate. Start at the person’s LinkedIn page and work your way to the high school yearbook. Good resources on backgrounding a person are the tipsheets available from Investigative Reporters and Editors for its members; it costs $60 a year to join.

"Journalists Do It..."

Chris Arnold of NPR did a segment about the Home Valuation Code of Conduct, a new rule enacted in May that requires arm’s length appraisals, and its impact on real estate sales.

The segment offers both sides of the story: Realtors who say the rule has slowed real estate sales, and others who say it’s needed because inflated values caused abuse.

Today’s Tip: Seek balance in your stories by reporting until you’ve talked to people on all sides of an issue -- and sometimes there are more than two.

In business reporting, this is even more important because you don’t want your articles to come off like press releases. As one SPJ chapter’s T-shirt says, “Journalists do it with at least two sources.”

"Start Thinking Like a Playwright"

Anne Ryman of The Arizona Republic heard about a war room at Arizona State University during her beat coverage of higher education. She started reporting for her story and then decided to use lessons learned from some recent training in narrative writing. The result is a story that begins:

Six people cluster around an oval table in a conference room at Arizona State University.

Behind them, large pieces of paper cover one wall. Printed on each is the name of a federal agency and how much economic-stimulus money is available from them.

NASA: $1 billion. National Science Foundation: $3 billion. Department of Energy: $30.7 billion.

Another chart tracks the share ASU has won so far: $26 million.

ASU's war room, in the fight for stimulus money, is in high gear. Three or four times a week, officials gather here for meetings and plot strategies for grabbing as much stimulus money as possible. They file weekly reports to ASU President Michael Crow.

Today’s Tip: Take the camera into the room. Recreate scenes so readers feel like they are in the room. If you weren’t in the room during the action, learn to ask detailed questions – who was where, who wore what, etc. – so you can write about it. Don Drake, a former Philadelphia Inquirer editor, was a huge proponent of writing like a playwright. Notes from one workshop he offered can be found here.

Anne says after her initial interview, she asked if she could return during a meeting in the war room. She sat along the sidelines with an audio recorder to capture the details of what was being said.

“I tried to in my notes put down as much as I could of what was happening,” she says. She marked details from the “scene” with arrows in her notebook margins – a technique she learned in her training. She called people after the meeting to clarify acronyms and terminology with which she wasn’t familiar.

Look behind the curtain

Jack Healy of The New York Times wrote a story about property tax lien holders foreclosing on properties in Toledo, Ohio. As foreclosures rise, the article offers another answer to what’s behind the increase.

Today’s Tip: Think like Dorothy and look behind the curtain.

Many news outlets have written about increasing foreclosures, but few have cited unpaid property taxes as a possible cause.

When you’re trying to determine why something happened, don’t stop at one answer. Talk with varied and multiple sources to get a full picture.

Brainstorm outside the newsroom

Forbes magazine’s E-Gang ’09 gives readers a closer look at the online video world with seven profiles, nine articles and a package of multimedia options.


Editor Kerry Dolan says the project started about four months ago with brainstorming and narrowing the options. “The real challenge was how do you figure out which companies to profile. It’s a matter of picking one that seems most promising and fits into the mix of what we’re trying to produce,” Kerry says.

Today’s Tip: When you’re launching a project, don’t limit your brainstorming to the newsroom. Ask industry insiders for ideas to ensure something isn’t just new to you.

Kerry says she researched the topic to see what had already been written. She also talked to technology industry people to get story ideas to represent the spectrum of different video innovators.

“It was all a matter of having the luxury of time,” says Kerry, who edited the feature for the first time. “Start early.”

Marching to the beat of a different drummer

Paula Schleis of the Akron Beacon Journal wanted to use music to attract younger readers to the business page. The result: a series called “Business of Bands.” The weekly stories focus on music careers and have featured a drum camp organizer, a booking agent and others in the area.

Paula’s beats include small business, entrepreneurs, business technology and economic development. “The band stories I've been finding seem to cover one or more of those topics, so it turned out to be a natural fit,” Paula says in an e-mail. “Also, I've gotten lots of feedback from traditional sources, like CEOs and business owners, so I'm confident that a wide range of people are finding the topics interesting and even useful.”

Today’s Tip: Expand your thinking about what constitutes business journalism.

“Cultures change, tastes change, interests change, and therefore our audience is always changing. Make an effort to keep up with them,” Paula says. She recommends noting things that interest you – even when you’re off the clock -- and looking for the business angle.

If your idea turns into a series, it doesn’t have to be a long one. Paula says she planned the “Business of Bands” to be a summer feature, but she hopes to keep it running through the fall. Her topic has the added benefit of usually offering visuals and sometimes audio.

Brainstorming for story ideas

Katie Johnston Chase of the Boston Globe was trying to come up with a travel/tourism story idea when it hit her: “What's one of the big expenses of traveling? Lodging. What's a way to cut those costs? By swapping homes with somebody.”

The brainstorming session that helped her focus on the importance of lodging costs, led to a story about Bostonians swapping homes to save money while on vacation.

Today’s Tip: Brainstorming by starting with general questions can help you develop story ideas. Follow up on those ideas with sourcing to see if they will work.

Katie describes her next steps:

“I called a home swap company and asked how they were doing during the recession, and the owner said he'd been getting record-breaking numbers since September 2008.

"And a story was born.”

Don't shortchange Web updates

Stephanie Rosenbloom of The New York Times gave readers a real-time story about Wal-Mart Stores Inc.’s earnings that non-investors could understand.

The article omits the jargon that plagues many earnings stories – especially earlier versions that hit the Web – and it clearly explains what the numbers mean. Stories on other Web sites tossed in analysts’ expectations or several earnings figures to create long first sentences.

Today’s Tip: Real-time Web updates need the same level of clarity and detail that printed stories do. Once you get the required “competitive-edge” stories up, step back and write a reader-friendly piece.

Stephanie’s Web piece started:
Wal-Mart, the nation’s largest retailer and one of the best-performing chains during the recession, reported a profit on Thursday that was essentially the same as last year.

She translated that from a Wal-Mart press release that started:
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) today reported diluted earnings per share from continuing operations for the second quarter of fiscal year 2010 of $0.88, at the top of the company’s guidance of $0.83 to $0.88. The effect of currency exchange rates reduced earnings by approximately $0.04 per share. Walmart earned $0.86 per share from continuing operations in the second quarter last year.

Get to the point

Katya Kazakina of Bloomberg News writes about a former financial broker turned yoga instructor. Her article offers a solid nut graf in the fourth paragraph that provides the “so what?” right away.

Today’s Tip: Get to the point. A great anecdote that delays the point of the story is worthless if your readers don’t understand why they’re reading your piece. Always ensure that you answer “so what?” by the fourth paragraph of your story.

Too often trend and feature pieces lose readers because the nut grafs come too late or not at all. Katya’s nut graf sums up her story and provides examples right away to support it:

Imparato, 28, is tapping into yoga’s growing appeal among the result-oriented financial brokers and dealers who want to de-stress and work out at the same time. Hedge funds, including Karsch Capital Management LP and Blue Ridge Capital LLC, offer on-site yoga classes to their employees. Pimco’s Bill Gross has said that he gets some of his best investment ideas while standing on his head.

Let people speak

John Blackstone of CBS’ “Sunday Morning” provides a closer look at California’s financial troubles from the mouths of the people experiencing it -- and with an eye to the past.

To set up the theme of California’s bust, the story juxtaposes images:

There was a time when the rest of the country looked west to California and saw a place of sunny beaches and postcard vistas . . . the thriving economy of Silicon Valley . . . and Hollywood, the world's capital of entertainment.
But lately the view west is of foreclosure signs and financial crises . . . and headlines about a state forced to pay its bills with IOUs.
In this economy, even Hollywood's dream factories can't deliver a happy ending.

Then, the segment offers a wide variety of voices, including the owner of a failed business that once did well by supplying props to movie makers and the founder of a going-out-of-business clothing store that opened in 1952.

Today’s Tip: Step back, and let your sources’ voices be heard. Humanize the facts with tales of real people.

People identify with other people, and letting your sources speak is the best way to connect with your audience.

Watch for hidden stories

Covered outlets and little signs limiting laptop usage at New York coffee shops led Erica Alini, a Wall Street Journal reporter, to ask the question: Might this be a pushback against job-hunters lingering in coffee shops? Her reporting found the answer was yes. Her editors put the story on the front page.

Today’s Tip: Pay attention to your surroundings. Consumer behavior often leads to good business stories.

“You never know where a good story is hiding,” Erica says. Erica says calls to café owners and other sources unveiled the trend. She then spent three days talking to café owners to see how owners tried to balance making nice and making a profit.

“Though I knew restrictions of laptops in New York weren't entirely new, the sour economy definitely seemed to have put the pedal on the metal,” she says. “Almost everyone I interviewed had introduced or tightened the restrictions since the fall of 2008.”

Beat Reporting 101 pays off

Talking with sources among real estate agents and buyers led reporter Carolyn Said of the San Francisco Chronicle to a story about condo buyers having trouble getting financing and walking away from their sales contracts. The story provides both a look at a local trend as well as an example of life after the subprime-loan crash.

Today’s Tip: Don’t forget the basics of beat reporting: establishing relationships and checking in. Not every call to sources needs to be for a quote on the story of the moment.

While working at a weekly, my editors required reporters to get out and meet with at least three people each week. On busy weeks, that proved to be a major nuisance, but the face-to-face interactions did help build sources.

Carolyn says she asks her sources about trends and issues they see in the field.
“The fact that it affects a broad category of consumers -- first-time home buyers who are at the low end of the market -- made it interesting enough to pursue,” she says. “I had to make several dozen calls to find the one project that was willing to discuss the difficulties.”

You Don’t Have to Reinvent the Wheel

Stories about shoppers turning to resale and thrift shops to find bargains have popped up across the country in recent weeks. Andrea K. Walker of The Baltimore Sun wrote about increasing sales at such stores in her area and offered sales data from a publicly traded company to support her article. She also made the story more tangible by including consumer voices.

Today’s Tip: Sometimes you don’t need to reinvent the wheel; just change the hubcap.

Watch coverage in other markets to find story ideas that will work for your audience. Here’s a great article by tech guru Amy Webb on ways to use social media to track news trends. Add your own spin and fresh reporting to localize the story. For instance, you could expand the bargain-shopping idea to online as well. Are clothing bids up on eBay? Are people trying to sell more items on their own instead of donating them? You could also use social media to find three local bargain hunters to see how they’re saving money.

Zig when others zag

ABC News’ “Nightline” found one company that’s profiting from the recession: www.PropertyRoom.com. The segment highlights a Los Angeles-area company that is the eBay for unclaimed, stolen goods that police departments don’t want to auction themselves. Along with the 30,000 bicycles it sells a year, the site also offers the occasional Breitling watch with a thousand diamonds. The interviewed company executive estimates that business was up 30 percent in 2008.

Today’s Tip: The recession hasn’t hurt all companies. Zig when others zag -- as legendary Philadelphia Inquirer editor Gene Roberts used to say -- and find some winners.

To find companies that haven’t been hurt by the recession, check with economists at your regional bank, university or Federal Reserve Bank office; plus the local Small Business Administration, Chamber of Commerce or business association offices.

Also, pay attention to what’s happening. For instance, the Cincinnati Enquirer did a story last week about pest-control companies staying busy because of a regional bedbug outbreak, and The Arizona Republic reported big gains for a publicly traded university specializing in online degrees.

Storytelling with court documents

James Bandler of Fortune magazine takes readers onto the scene as he tells the story of Dina Wein Reis, a woman accused of bilking several companies out of products totaling more than $20 million.


James says he first became aware of Wein Reis in 2008, but Madoff, AIG and other stories prevented him from writing her story right away. He started reporting this spring, he says.

“I wondered how one woman could have pulled off such a massive and complicated alleged fraud for so long,” he says.

He used court documents from civil litigation, company data obtained by authorities, wiretap transcripts and interviews with several people, excluding Wein Reis, to compile the article.

Today’s Tip: Court documents can help you piece together facts and provide details that bring your stories alive.

James says: “First read the docket sheet, and then the amended complaint. They provide a great guide to key arguments, exhibits and names of involved parties. Get to know the lawyers on both sides. They can help point you to interesting witnesses and documents.

“Transcripts are your friends, as are depositions -- if you can get your hands on them. They're often -- but not always -- entered in the public record.”

Tight-Lipped Executives? Find a Bank Consultant

As more banks received warnings from the FDIC to clean up their balance sheets, business reporters Jennifer Bjorhus and Chris Serres at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis decided to take a step back from the daily stories for a closer look. After months of reporting, they launched their “Lenders Gone Wild” series.

There wasn’t a lot of public information available for the privately held banks, and bank executives didn’t want to talk, Jennifer says. She e-mailed, called and even drove to former executives’ homes. In the end, information from local bank consultants helped tremendously, she says.

Today’s Tip: Seek bank consultants when writing about the banking industry. They work directly with banks in your area and can provide a clearer perspective of what’s happening locally.

“They’re hired by local banks for help,” Jennifer says. “Every metro area has a cottage industry. They’re a great untapped resource.” She says you can find them through other bankers and even online searches.