Engage readers with interactive charts, graphics

BBC News reporter Steve Schifferes’ story about bailout spending offers interactive graphics and words to explain how the United States and the United Kingdom have spent the most.

New calculations by the BBC, based on IMF data given to G20 finance ministers, shows these countries have spent a total of $10 trillion (£6tn).
The UK and US spent the most, with the UK spending far more, 94% of its GDP compared to 25% in the US.
That equates to £30,000 per person in the UK and $10,000 in the US.

Seven interactive slides help tell the story before readers even get to the article.

Today’s Tip: Use interactive tools to illustrate your story.

Graphics help reach readers and viewers who won’t get to the end of your story. Yet for those who do, you'll want to make sure your story isn’t just a rehash of the visual data.

For more information on ways to use graphics, read this 2001 article by Joanne Miller of the Charlotte Observer. She details how the paper created its graphics packages following 9/11.

Ask the hard questions

Fortune contributor David A. Kaplan’s profile of Charlie Rose offers a lively look at the interviewer.

At Table No. 1 at Michael's, the best seats on the silly power-lunch circuit in Midtown Manhattan, Charlie Rose is holding forth in fabulousness. America's tallest, handsomest, best-connected, most inquisitive, most talkative late-night TV interviewer is greeting media princess Tina Brown and her husband, Sir Harold Evans.
There's Christie Hefner, resplendent in all white, who waves as she arrives, as does Jeff Greenfield of CBS. Charlie barely has time to enjoy his $34 roasted free-range chicken (with natural jus).

But the article isn’t afraid explore the issue of the show’s sponsors. The story even says Fortune contacted all of the show’s underwriters.

The fundraising produces a web of peculiar interconnections between Rose and the people he covers. The foundation of media mogul Barry Diller and fashion designer Diane von Fürstenberg is a longtime supporter of the program, most recently in the amount of $200,000. Both Diller and von Fürstenberg have been on the show. So has Rupert Murdoch, overlord of News Corp., which is a Charlie Rose underwriter.

Today’s Tip: Don’t be afraid to tackle the delicate issues in business profiles.

Business profiles require the same balance as other stories. You have to cover the tough questions even if the person is well liked. Start off by being upfront about your intentions to produce a balanced piece. Do your research before your interview and schedule a follow-up conversation to be sure you’ve covered all of the angles.

Don't forget the human side of business stories

John Schmid of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found a human angle to help tell the tale of the final chapter of a Milwaukee company.

Nearly 10,000 people once worked at the sprawling ruins known to some as the former A.O. Smith industrial site, to others as the deathbed of Tower Automotive.
Now it is down to a single worker, Rich Wendling. Wendling learned recently that his final shift comes in November, following the City of Milwaukee's decision to buy the mothballed property and create an industrial park.

John says he has covered the industrial site since 2004 as part of the ongoing story of Milwaukee’s industrial history. He maintained sources and was able to tell the story of the site's final days through the story of Rich Wendling.

Today’s Tip, as John says: “It makes no sense to do economics reporting in a vacuum that relies on statistics. Good econ reporting is both social, human and global.”

By talking to a person with whom most readers could identify, John made the story more accessible to a wide variety of readers. By intertwining Rich Wendling’s history and the company’s history, he helped draw a vivid picture of the impact the site had on the city and the employees.

Combining trends and tips

Stephanie Rosenbloom of The New York Times offers a strong trend story on coupon clipping.

Thanks to the miserable economy, coupons — like board games and family dinners around the kitchen table — have made a comeback. The recession has even made coupon clippers out of some groups that once avoided them, including well-to-do and young shoppers.

The story offers examples of the hard-working coupon clippers who pay pennies on the dollars for their groceries while also offering consumer tips and a wealth of data on who’s clipping these days.

Today’s Tip: Integrate consumer stories and trend pieces to create interesting and useful reads.

Readers want tips, and they want to be in the know. By integrating the two concepts, as Stephanie has done, you can offer an appealing story that includes a “you can do it, too” element.

Take data to the ground level

Jonathan Karl of ABC News and Thomas Frank of USA Today tracked how the federal government has spent money on small airports that see few passengers.

Jonathan’s segment looks at stimulus funding used for commercial airports that provide fewer than five flights a day. His story singles out the Ouzinkie Airport in Alaska, which he says “hit the stimulus jackpot with $15 million. That’s $100,000 for each of the town’s 150 residents -- even though there’s another airport just 30 minutes away.”

Thomas’ article focuses on the Airport Improvement Program, which offers federal funding to general aviation airports that serve only private planes. He notes in his story that the money used on the commercial airports comes from taxes on all airplane-ticket sales.

The taxes can add up to 15% to the cost of a flight — or about $29 to a $200 round-trip ticket.
Federal lawmakers have used some of the money to build and maintain the world's most expansive and expensive network of airports — 2,834 of them nationwide — with no scheduled passenger flights. Known as general-aviation airports, they operate separately from the 139 well-known commercial airports that handle almost all passenger flights.
In the first full accounting of the 28-year-old Airport Improvement Program, USA TODAY found that Congress has directed $15 billion to general-aviation airports, which typically are tucked on country roads and industrial byways.

Today’s Tip: Take data to the ground level.

By gathering details and seeing the airports in action, the reporters were able to put together stories showing how the money was misspent.

The USAToday story includes an interactive map that allows viewers to click on symbols for each individual U.S. airport and see how much air traffic and federal money it has received.

If you’d like to look at stimulus funding in your area, check out this piece from W.J. Hennigan to help you track stimulus spending. You can also review the archived live blog of the Reynolds Center’s Sept. 21 workshop in Dallas with New York Times reporter Ron Nixon on the topic. Nixon will also be teaching how to track stimulus funds at a free Reynolds Center workshop in New Orleans on Nov. 9. For more information or to register, please click here. To participate in the live blog of that workshop, go to www.BusinessJournalism.org on Nov. 9.

Bringing data to life

Rico Gagliano of American Public Media’s “Marketplace Money” used a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland to create a segment questioning how two seemingly similar areas could have such dramatically different foreclosure rates.

North Collinwood's rate in 2007? Almost 21 percent. Braddock's? 5 percent. Both places should have been equally hit by foreclosures, but the Ohio community got hit harder.

Today’s Tip: Use additional sources to bring data from agencies such as the Federal Reserve alive.

Rico adds the human element by driving us around a neighborhood with him to see what the data means. He also focused the segment by citing only the foreclosure rates, although the Federal Reserve report offers lots of numbers.

Also of note, the same show aired a segment illustrating the ripple effect of reduced spending by Cleveland consumers. Dan Bobkoff shows how the loss of the father's job affected one family’s spending at individual businesses. The lesson: follow the money.

Documents needn't mean bland

BusinessWeek journalists Paul Barrett, Jack Ewing and Brian Grow detail handgun maker Glock’s success, legal battles and an assassination attempt in a story based heavily on legal documents and other paper sources. The nut graf, which comes after the company’s history is established, says:

Behind the Glock phenomenon, however, is another story, one rife with intrigue and allegations of wrongdoing. The company's hidden history raises questions about its taxpayer-financed law-and-order franchise. Is this a company that deserves the patronage of America's police?

The Sept. 10 cover story, which spans seven online pages, flows well despite having few direct quotes from interviews.

Today’s Tip: Articles driven by quotations from documents versus those from live interviews don’t have to be boring. Use your storytelling skills to craft stories that keep readers intrigued.

To help you do this, check out tips from the Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism last year. The big point attendees cited was the need for details, which is what Paul, Jack and Brian give readers in the Glock piece. For instance, in describing the attempted assassination, they say:

…Glock [then 70] was attacked in an underground garage. The hit man, a former professional wrestler and French Legionnaire named Jacques Pecheur, bashed the businessman on the head with a rubber mallet, a technique apparently aimed at making it look like the victim had fallen down and fatally injured himself. Glock, physically fit from daily swimming—often in the frigid lake abutting his home near Klagenfurt, Austria—fought back. When police arrived, they found Glock bleeding from gashes to his skull. Pecheur, 67, was unconscious.

In this podcast interview, Paul tells how he got onto the story and how he got such good information from legal documents on this private, foreign firm.

When you’ve got a good story, tell it

Washington Post reporter Steve Hendrix found an unconventional group to tell the tale of the recession: courier bikers. His story about the decline in messengers because of the economy, technology and 9/11 begins with this image-laden lede:

Getting a meticulously prepared legal brief to a courthouse or federal agency on time used to require a bit of comic-book valor. Just before deadline, exhausted lawyers handed off the document to a character in the tight Lycra of a superhero, the shoulder bag of a Pony Express rider and the bulging thighs of an athlete. One of Washington's legions of bicycle messengers would then dart through perilous traffic and any weather to deliver the goods in the nick of time.

The story sings with quotes such as "This last week, I set a personal best for futility: I sat out here for seven hours and made $25," [said Andy Zalan, a longtime bike messenger and head of the D.C. Bicycle Couriers Association]. Steve also paints pictures with phrases such as “six men who looked as if they'd been taxidermied by Brooks Brothers.”

Today’s Tip: Especially when you’ve got an offbeat story, tell it in a colorful way. Use imagery and great quotes to bring it alive.

Steve’s story offers humor while looking at an industry – not known to fit the norm – in trouble.

Put yourself in the readers' place

Several news outlets have taken on bank fees for debit cards in the past few weeks as outrage over the fees rises. Ron Lieber and Andrew Martin of The New York Times tackled the issue with a series called The Card Game. Their first story looks at how much banks earn when consumers overspend.

According to the F.D.I.C. study, a $27 overdraft fee that a customer repays in two weeks on a $20 debit purchase would incur an annual percentage rate of 3,520 percent. By contrast, penalty interest rates on credit cards generally run about 30 percent.

The series, a tag-team effort with PBS’s "Frontline," offers videos, charts and primers for consumers to avoid fees.

Today’s Tip: Don’t forget the tips for consumers.

A majority of readers probably identified with the anecdotes cited in the story. Instead of leaving them in the amen corner, the package offers practical information for readers to avoid the fees and other resources – something many news articles omit.

As former business copy desk chief Jim Moffatt used to remind us at The Philadelphia Inquirer, PYIRP, or Put Yourself in the Readers’ Place.

Finding stories in the fine print

Using documents available from the Securities and Exchange Commission, Del Jones of USA Today crafted a story about how public companies have increased spending on security for CEOs while cutting other costs.

Starbucks, which has laid off workers, closed stores and switched from whole to 2% milk to save pennies a gallon, bumped its spending to $511,079 last year on the personal and home security of CEO Howard Schultz. FedEx, which quit matching employee 401(k) contributions, spent $595,875 on the security of CEO Fred Smith. Walt Disney spent $645,368 for CEO Robert Iger; Occidental Petroleum spent $575,407 for Ray Irani; and McKesson spent $401,706 for John Hammergren.

Top execs usually get more death threats when layoffs and closures occur, the story says.

Today’s Tip: Keep your eyes out for proxy statements, also known as DEF 14A. These statements provide details about CEO compensation and benefits. You can see the latest filings at http://secwatch.com or http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml.

For instance, Sara Lee Corp. filed its proxy on Wednesday. Along with disclosing CEO Brenda Barnes’ total compensation for fiscal 2009 of $15.2 million, it also notes that the company has discontinued the use of its corporate jet.

A great watchdog of the footnotes in SEC documents is Michelle Leder, who shares what she finds on her blog at www.footnoted.org. Until earlier this year, she also did a blog for BusinessJournalism.org called Under the Magnifying Glass. She is the author of the 2003 book, Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company's True Value.

How to write with authority

For his anniversary piece on the collapse of Lehman Bros., Stevenson Jacobs of The Associated Press wrote about what hasn’t changed:

That Wall Street is making money again in essentially the same ways that thrust the banking system into chaos last fall is reason for concern on several levels, financial analysts and government officials say.

Adam Davidson and Alex Blumberg of NPR reported a “Morning Edition” segment on how difficult it is to merge regulatory agencies – although virtually everyone acknowledges there are too many financial regulators:

Economists say this kind of problem stems from regulatory arbitrage. When more than one regulator oversees the same kind of activity, financial firms find ways to play one off against the other. It's like what every 4-year-old has figured out — if Mommy won't let you, maybe Daddy will. Or worse, if Mommy thinks Daddy is watching you, and Daddy thinks Mommy is watching you, then you can get away with anything.

Both pieces illustrate the in-depth reporting that allows the authors to write with authority.

Today’s Tip: To write with authority, report, report, report.

“When you write with authority -- with a knowledge of your topic and an awareness of how it connects to other topics -- your storytelling becomes credible,” according to this Poynter Online report of author Susan Eaton’s presentation at the 2002 Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism.

Eaton notes that context plus crystallization equals authority. Crystallization is “the art of finding and presenting the person, place, or moment that somehow exemplifies your broader theme,” according to the report.

Another key to writing authoritatively is to stick to active “Anglo-Saxon” verbs and avoid the passive voice, according to this brief video of Alan Pike, teaching at Cornell University.

The best views aren't just from the penthouse

Kai Ryssdal of Marketplace offered a segment, carried on many public radio stations, about the financial crisis that, as one listener commented, “brought the issues to a more understandable, personal level.”

Today’s Tip: Add a micro dimension to make macroeconomic stories more useful for your audience.

For this Lehman Bros. anniversary piece, Kai focused on people at both ends of the financial spectrum: Millicent “Mama” Hill, whose Los Angeles home was foreclosed upon after she took out a subprime loan she couldn’t repay, and John Chrin, a former Wall Street executive turned college instructor. Then, to provide context, he added in experts on the financial crisis, the psychology of financial decision-making and the financial trust index.

“Excellent, excellent piece,” wrote listener Zaid Hassan of Austin, Texas. “Spellbinding to be reminded that, in the end, it really is just a piece of paper,” Hassan said, referring to the central thesis of the report: Without trust in the financial system, a dollar is really just a piece of paper.

A picture worth a two-parter – and a prize

A photo in The Seattle Times of landslides led its reporters Hal Bernton and Justin Mayo to look behind what caused the landslides – and the resulting $57 million in damage from them and the concomitant floods -- earning them and photographer Steve Ringman the James V. Risser Prize for Western Environmental Journalism.

Today’s Tip: Photographs and photojournalists often can offer great tips worth additional investigation. If something looks suspicious, check it out.

Their two-part series, which published in July 2008, looked at the role Weyerhaeuser played in the December 2007 landslides. As The Times wrote in announcing the award on Sept. 8:

Using software to map the impacts of clear-cutting by the timber company Weyerhaeuser, they found that such massive removal of trees in one harvest region accounted for one-third of landslides there.

The project "stood out for its ambition, its persistence and its compelling conclusions," one judge wrote. "The combination of computer-assisted reporting and strong interviews offered a template that should be used for journalists covering timber controversies and other land-use debates across the West."

The Times explains how it did the research comparing clear-cut areas to landslide sites, which undergirded the series and resulted in a very cool interactive map.

Standing up to a legal challenge

Ben Popken and Meg Marco of The Consumerist blog haven't let a lawsuit stop them from investigating Cash4Gold.com, a Florida company that promoted its scrap-gold-buying business in a Super Bowl ad featuring rapper MC Hammer. Their report says:

We believe citizens, consumers, and employees should be able to exercise their free-speech rights online – and journalists should be able to report on those efforts – without fear of intimidation.

Today’s Tip: Make sure your story can withstand legal challenge by triple-checking your facts, and have contentious stories reviewed by your lawyer before publication.

Ben and Meg report that they talked with numerous sources including former employees, customers, the Better Business Bureau, the Pompano Beach fire department and the U.S. Postal Service. They also researched Web sites, legal documents, complaints to the Florida Attorney General and public records, providing links to much of what they found. They also detail their unsuccessful efforts to get an interview with the company’s CEO.

In addition, The Consumerist, which is a scion of the publisher of Consumer Reports, indicates it did original research using “Consumer Reports’ ‘mystery shoppers’ – the nationwide team of anonymous consumers who help buy the gear that our parent company tests. The mystery shoppers sent 24 identical gold pendants and chains to Cash4Gold and some of its national competitors. The necklaces were purchased for $175 each. We calculated their 'melt value' – meaning how much the raw gold was worth – as about $70 each, based on the market price for gold when the necklaces were received by the companies.”

What were the results?

Cash4Gold sent back checks ranging from $7.60 to $12.72 (or 11% to 18% of melt value), the lowest amounts of any firm. But others weren't far behind: GoldKit offered $7.81 to $20.59, and GoldPaq, $8.22 to $13.11. Each of those deals was worse than what our mystery shoppers could get at local jewelers and pawn shops, which offered anywhere from $25 to $50. The results reinforce advice we've offered before, which is that consumers should not use these highly marketed services because the payments they offer are too low.

Looking for chicken biscuits

Tanya Ott of WBHM public radio in Birmingham showed the aftermath of a company closure in Wadley, Ala. Her segment offers suspense and a bit of a twist: The patio-furniture company closed because of an accounting scandal – not slumping sales.

The segment has wonderful details – Bonnie’s Country Kitchen no longer delivers chicken biscuits to the shuttered Meadowcraft Inc. plant. It paints a picture of the small town and helps listeners understand the repercussions of the closure.

Today’s Tip: In the midst of an ongoing news story, look for examples that don’t fit the mold and report them with vivid detail.

Tanya’s story reminds us that the recession isn’t the only one-eyed monster hurting businesses.

Relate, create, innovate: New ways to tell a story

David Kempa, a reporter for News21, a summer reporting project where writers set out to define innovation, traveled to the Mexican border and into southern Mexico and produced a three-part piece that looks closely at economic conditions in the area.

As you scroll through the project, the graphic elements at the top of the page help drive the users' navigation through the story.

Today’s Tip: Redefine storytelling. The Internet provides ample space for photos, videos, words and graphics. Take advantage of the opportunity to engage your audience and help them connect to your stories even more.

As reporters, look for ways to integrate multimedia elements into your stories. For instance, Joe Drape, the horse-racing reporter for The New York Times, provided a video looking at the fates of older racehorses.

Called “Where Do Racehorses Go?” it lasts 7 minutes and 14 seconds and helps the audience connect emotionally to the story.

For tips on how to augment stories with multimedia, check out the Innovation Roundup from the News21 group.

Turn board-meeting minutes into a scoop

Stella Hopkins, business enterprise reporter of The Charlotte Observer, took North Carolina’s first bank failure since 1993 and turned it into a story questioning another cause of bank failures.


Her nutgraf:

Many people share blame for the country's financial crisis, from reckless CEOs to hands-off regulators to eager borrowers. The Cape Fear (Bank) saga highlights another group – bank directors, who are charged with safeguarding their institutions and shareholders.

Stella says the story started when she noted in an SEC filing the resignation of director Davie Waggett, who’d also defaulted on loans from the bank.

“Initially, we thought this story would focus on insider lending,” she says. “Reporting led us to the realization that the focus was the directors.”

Stella reviewed more than 450 pages of board meeting minutes, which were available because the bank had failed. The minutes, which cost about $100 to photocopy, provided greater insight into the loans.

Today’s Tip: Don’t overlook board-meeting minutes as sources of information. They can give you a behind-the-scenes look at how a company is run.

Stella says reading federal reports and summaries of past bank failures also can help you better understand what to search for. Finally, she says to develop a relationship with key regulators, state and federal. “They can be a huge help, on background, to test premises,” Stella says.

"Lies, damned lies and statistics"

Dennis Cauchon of USA Today writes that women will soon outnumber men in the work force. He uses statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for his story, but more importantly, he tells readers what the numbers don’t say:

The change reflects the growing importance of women as wage earners, but it doesn't show full equality, [Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Research,] says. On average, women work fewer hours than men, hold more part-time jobs and earn 77% of what men make, she says. Men also still dominate higher-paying executive ranks.

Today's Tip: Don’t mislead readers by omitting what the numbers don’t show.

The story easily could have focused just on women’s gains in the workplace, which is how the Chicago CBS station ran its story. Not until the last line of the CBS piece does it point out: “Even outnumbering men, a woman, on average, will still make 20 percent less than the guy next to her.”

As Mark Twain said in his autobiography, quoting a remark attributed to 19th century British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”

Boxers + briefs = boom?

As Ylan Q. Mui, staff writer for The Washington Post, mined apparel data from a market-research company, she came across the men’s underwear index, supposedly an economic indicator. That data turned into a story that starts:

For one answer to the nation's most pressing economic question – when will the recession end? – just take a peek inside the American man's underwear drawer.
There may be some new pairs there, judging by recent reports from retailers and analysts, and that could mean better days ahead for everyone.

Today’s Tip: Look for telling pieces of data. Economic indicator and sales reports abound. Search for new, even offbeat, data that tell the story.

An informal index – the shopping-bag index – was employed by former Ernst & Young analyst Brian Ford, who traveled the malls in the Philadelphia area each Black Friday, counting the number of bags carried by shoppers. Philadelphia Inquirer reporter Jane Von Bergen tagged along with him for a memorable report on holiday shopping one year.

“In business writing,” Ylan says, “we are constantly assaulted with numbers, and it can be tough to dig for the interesting ones. I knew that any story that involved underwear would definitely be a reader!”

Ylan says she searched for other firms that tracked men’s underwear sales and checked with retailers. “This was a light-hearted and quirky story, but I still wanted it to be grounded in some economic theory and hard data,” Ylan says.

While getting sales information from retailers posed a challenge, gathering the courage to interview men about their underwear was an even bigger one, she says. “There were more than a few awkward conversations.”

Story Lives On with Audience's Help

BusinessWeek has found a way to keep some stories alive: update them with its audience’s help.

In 2005, the magazine did an article called, “Blogs Will Change Your Business.” When editors realized the story was still getting major hits online, they updated the story in 2008 with blue icons to alert readers to new data and called it, “Social Media Will Change Your Business.” But they’re not done: they want to do it again and have posted a video seeking audience participation.

“We have to keep the story going, and we can’t do it alone,” Stephen Baker, who co-wrote the article, says in the video.

Today’s Tip: Dig through your archives and see what needs refreshing. Look for articles that particularly resonated with readers. Think about how technological and economic changes have changed the story and seek reader input. If you’re working on an evolving story, keep it on your to-do list to update down the road.

John A. Byrne, BusinessWeek.com’s editor in chief, talks about its strategy of differentiating itself with high levels of audience engagement in a Q&A on Econsultancy.com. Speaking of the social media article, he says:

“Even though it was published in February of 2008, it remains one of the three or five most-read stories every month. Why? Because Steve and Heather [Green] asked for and got heavy audience collaboration on the story.”