Breaking Business News Online Requires Multi-Faceted Approach

Writing breaking business stories for publication on the Internet takes the notion of getting it fast and getting it right to an entirely new level.

This is partly due to the very nature of business news itself -- information that investors are using to make any myriad of financial decisions, many of them for execution on an equities market, and all of it in real time.

But it is the medium that gives this particular type of business journalism its potency. With the Internet, unlike television, people often have the option of going directly to the source and getting the information unfiltered from the company itself, whether in the form of a press release, Webcast or regulatory filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The reader, therefore, is coming to you for information on not just who, what, when and how, but also why -- why this development is important for this company and what it means to that company's investors -- almost as quickly as the news is being released. Getting it fast and getting it right, therefore, merely make up the foundation for writing breaking business news online. Then emerges the true goal: real-time interpretation.

Online business journalists don't have the luxury of spending the afternoon analyzing the story. Headline writers immediately catch the news as it comes across the wires. They run through a mental checklist of criteria to determine its importance -- Microsoft's decision to pay the largest one-time dividend in corporate history, for example, will deserve far more attention than a penny-stock company's election of a new director. The headline writers get to work immediately, sending out one-line pieces of information that must, in and of themselves, tell their own story. Meanwhile, the beat reporter starts writing the full story, pulling each of those strands together for a so-called "first take," the initial version of the story that will typically contain no more than four or five sentences and be published within 10 or 15 minutes, preferably less.

Then the beat reporter's expertise really kicks in. He or she must immediately go beyond the facts, drawing on a storehouse of knowledge to provide context (maybe this isn't first set of layoffs the company has announced but the third in the last six months -- the beat reporter will know this better than anyone else in the newsroom). Well-established sources will make themselves available to talk to the reporter at a moment's notice.

Companies, too, now know that, not only will they be asked for comment immediately, but their comments will also be posted online for public consumption moments later.

In order to get a good, multi-dimensional story published quickly, it often takes the skills of more than one person. When a company discloses an SEC investigation into its accounting and notes that the probe could hamper a pending $1 billion takeover deal, someone needs to go back and comb through the merger filing -- was there a break-up fee attached to this deal, for example? With all the accounting investigations lately, is this a trend? Someone else needs to go back and look for other examples of M&A's that have been called off due to regulatory probes. We need to get both companies on record as to their intentions. And with big stories, words don't tell the whole story: We need pictures of the companies' products or main executives, charts of their stock moves and tables linking the biggest probes with the biggest takeover deals. And so on. It's all hands on deck.

There is no substitute for preparation. Many stories on the business beat can be prepared for ahead of time, from the release of economic statistics to a company's latest quarterly results. Familiarizing yourself with what came before and what is expected this time around is invaluable. Pre-writing a story template will save you time; lining up interviews with sources beforehand will ensure you access to the experts ahead of your competitors.

And knowing how such information is presented -- how it is literally laid out on the page -- will help your eyes find that information faster.

But there is only so much of that kind of preparation you can do. Mergers and acquisitions, corporate investigations and ratings downgrades are just a few examples of the type of news that you have to expect to hit at any moment. Look for the news you're not expecting. The earnings release may contain more than just sales and profit; the plant closures and subsequent layoffs and third-quarter charge buried near the bottom are what the stock is going to trade on.

Check your facts. In the rush to get the news out, mistakes are easily made, and most of them aren't because you misunderstood, but because you read or typed the information incorrectly, misspelling someone's name, comparing the latest quarterly sales figure to most recent quarter instead of the same period the year before, or typing "million" instead of "billion."

Writing breaking business stories online can be a harrowing experience. It's also a thrill, with all of the above steps happening continuously, even simultaneously, for multiple stories, 24 hours, seven days a week.

Newspapers will never look the same again.