Stay Calm: Top Five Mistakes on the Business Beat are Avoidable

By Vandana Sinha
February 9, 2004 02:52 PM

I froze with fear. My brain went blank and before I knew it, I was protesting, "But I can't do that!" to the man who'd just recruited me for a summer internship at his daily newspaper.

What horrific job was he asking me to perform? Interning on the, (gasp), Business Desk, and I was prepared to slash my wages in half to prevent this from happening. "Schools," I pleaded. "I'll cover education. Or send me out to one of the bureaus. Even cops. But, please, not business!"

The recruiter had to call in another business reporter -- an old college mate of mine -- to talk me off my ledge and, really, prevent me from making one of the biggest mistakes of my career.

Business even sounds scary. Numbers are the reason we're writers, and not better-paid engineers. Words are our currency, and we place our stock in stories. And yet, under the very noses we've long wrinkled at mathematical equations, business has bonded some of this century's most important stories -- from a crumbling technology economy to rebuilding in Iraq .

When Enron captivates more spotlight than 'N Sync, when falling stocks affect more daily lives than rising temperatures, when one of the year's biggest celebrity scandals is clean queen Martha Stewart prematurely trading stock of a friend's drug company, then you know business has taken a turn for the front page.

And yet, hundreds of incoming interns are no doubt still pleading with recruiters to save them from the business beat. No better way to battle fear than with wisdom wrapped in a Top Five list, so here are the mistakes and fixes I've gleaned from that fateful summer internship on the Business Desk -- and four years of business journalism thereafter.

Mistake #5: Assuming you're omniscient

First lesson of business journalism: Don't think you know everything. That should go for many beats beyond business, but the corporate marketplace, in particular, can be its own inexplicable morass. The complexity of corporate-speak can easily sail over any sane person's head, and poring through today's balance sheets would leave anyone off-kilter.

So read everything you can about your company beforehand -- check your newspaper's archives, visit the company's Web site and treat LexisNexis as your best friend. Ask questions, lots of them, of the veteran business reporters, your editors, chamber officials, analysts and, especially, the company. Don't think twice about asking the stupidest questions of the smartest people. It's how you learn. Plus, it prevents your editor from asking you to fill five holes in eight minutes before deadline.

Mistake #4: Believing the hype

Another difficult lesson is remembering that business owners -- even the very nice and funny ones -- can weave fabrication through truth until it no longer resembles the latter. They want to glide over the financial bumps that are your job to catch and report, carefully choosing their words to steer you far, far away from them.

Turn to the company's former employees to confirm or contradict what the CEO's telling you. Also crosscheck figures, statements and predictions with archived stories in area newspapers, industry analysts -- including ones who don't cover your company -- and competitors, who are only too happy to inform you when your company leader is lying. But most importantly, learn to be skeptical of executive spin -- especially when it seems to defy logic, like promising high returns after four straight years of losses. Nothing's more embarrassing than writing about those high returns, and then watching the year bring nothing but red.

Mistake #3: Turning into an extremist

That, incidentally, leads nicely into the next warning: Don't buy into extremes. Analysts, trade groups, even other publications, may be trumpeting the next huge revolution or mourning the next huge recession, but rarely does reality ever fall into either end of that spectrum.

The best way to avoid the hype is context. Place both the revolutions and recessions into their proper historical, geographical, statistical and personal perspectives to lend more credibility to each -- and prevent your audience from over-reacting to every other headline.

Mistake #2: Losing sight of the people

But don't forget to focus on that audience. There are faces behind the figures -- people who make business decisions, and people affected by them. Not coincidentally, these are the same fine folks checking their doorsteps for your newspaper each morning. Tell their stories. Reporters who neglect that human element of a business piece often lose their readers after the first few graphs and miss the real story altogether.

Be in the habit of thinking about each person's motivations, inspirations and experiences that helped shape his or her business philosophies. And don't rely on a speed-dial of chamber chiefs. You don't want to go straight from the figures to figureheads. But they could point you to small business owners or employees who can lend personality and color to your piece.

And Mistake #1: (Drum roll…) Assuming you're deficient

Finally, as you're following Rule No. 1, and not assuming you know everything, also remember not to think you know nothing. (Let the confusion settle, then read on.) OK, translation: Reporters generally know more than they think about the business beat. "They're intimidated by it," explains Laura Castaneda, assistant journalism professor at University of Southern California 's Annenberg School for Communication. "They think it's so technical that there's no way to master it. But all of the same rules of journalism apply here."

Reporters research the topic, interview the players, ask follow-up questions on confusing points, talk to the experts, then write the story -- a process that should ring bells for all journalists. Sure, toss in some jargon, acronyms and a few moments of subtraction or multiplication -- a.k.a., a few clicks of a computer-screen calculator -- but, remember, those journalistic distractions are hardly safe from stories on military operations or student test scores. Castaneda recommends reading, reading and then more reading -- of business sections, business magazines, business guides and great business stories. "There's nothing to be afraid of," she says. So don't be.

By the end of that summer, I wasn't. I loved telling business stories, narrating them in new ways and introducing my readers to characters they wouldn't otherwise have known. So much so that after the newspaper hired me, informing me I'd be shipped to a bureau to cover community news, I froze with fear. My brain went blank save one thought: I can't do that!

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