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.

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.”

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]