Business Journalist's First Steps Require Courage

By Jennifer Inez Ward
January 28, 2004 12:15 PM

Here is my confession: Numbers make me nervous. Yes, I am an old-school type reporter who stumbled through Algebra in high school and ducked statistics in college.

And now I am a business reporter. It's a beat I love. A field that's as dense as it is challenging. Previously, I worked as a reporter covering courts, city government, state politicians and municipal water issues -- never did I believe that I would work as a business reporter.

By chance, after completing graduate school at University of California at Berkeley in the spring of 2001, I took an internship at CBS MarketWatch.com, where I worked on the personal finance desk.

At MarketWatch, I first had to learn how to move with the daily rhythms of the rapidly changing financial markets.

And I was terrified when I started. Like many cub reporters, the acronyms and financial terms were confusing. I had to learn the difference between the NASDAQ and NYSE. To my ears, financial analysts seemed to be speaking a foreign language, and major intimidation came in the form of a business spreadsheet.

Yet I hung on. I discovered the fast pace of business suited my go-go personality. I also like finding out how different industries functioned. Quizzing CEOs on a variety of topics was also pretty thrilling.

At MarketWatch, my editor let me do a wide swath of stories, many of which touched on the impact of the dot-com burst that was picking up steam in the summer of 2001. One story from that time period focused on a Challenger survey that proclaimed the U.S. labor market was ready to snap up recently laid off workers for the upcoming summer. At the time, it seemed many experts were talking about market correction, with a quick rebound. Few could predict the long hard recession ahead.

Sometimes, I was ahead of the curve with my stories. At CBS MarketWatch, I wrote about the rising number of states passing laws against telemarketing cold-calls. No one at that time was even thinking of federal legislation, despite the increasing anger of consumers.

Now as a business reporter covering Southern Alameda County for ANG Newspapers, I've tried to write stories that connect to the non-business reader. Although I have a lot of technology companies on my beat, I've tried to write about the mom-and-pop establishments. I've also worked at showing how a small company can blossom into an international force, almost overnight.

Recently, I had an opportunity to write in depth about the rise of InVision, a company little known prior to Sept. 11, but now has its bomb detection machines in nearly every airport in the United States.

Business reporting offers its unique challenges. Covering private companies effectively means using all the resources available -- including inside sources -- to gather information that's readily available from the public companies. There's also a lot of technical or industry speak that pops up. I learned early on to be aggressive in making sure I understand what a company does and how various industries work.

Although I never saw myself becoming a business reporter, today I can say I wouldn't choose another beat.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism