Secrets of the Trade: Authoring Business Books versus Covering Business for a Newspaper

Some things don’t change. Whether I’m working on a book about business or covering it as an investigative business reporter for The Washington Post, I always find myself returning to one gnawing question as I hunker down to begin writing: Why didn’t I become a farmer?

It’s not the most obvious question, but such is the agony of staring at a blank computer screen, the cursor blinking impatiently, as you struggle to find a way into a complex story. Along the way, you realize that this writing gig is all folly and that you should have worked the land instead. Hence, the farmer question. But then, just as everything seems lost, adrenaline surges through your body—a fear of failure—and suddenly, the words start flowing. For one more day, at least, you can still call yourself a writer.

Therein lies the secret: In many ways, there is little difference between the process of writing a book about business and covering the topic for a newspaper. Both require a compulsion to find out what happened, an obsession to document details and, often, a need to shed light on wrongdoing. Such was my experience covering AOL for The Post, which turned into a yearlong investigation of the Internet company. And that was also my experience writing a book based on my Post investigation, Stealing Time: Steve Case, Jerry Levin, and the Collapse of AOL Time Warner.

And yet, there are differences, of course. When you write about business for a newspaper, you are fortunate if you’re granted 4,000 words to tell a story. The unstated pact with the reader is, time is precious, and you’d better get to the point before the jump page. For a business book, you have 20 times more space—80,000 words. While that amount of copy is a luxury, it is also a responsibility, demanding a strict approach, or you can quickly lose yourself in a morass of information. So I’ve hit upon a solution: I have become my own best secretary.

The first order of business is to create a system of organization to keep track of the mountain of incoming information. For a business book, I interview hundreds of people and research scores of related topics, so for each one, I create a file. In it, I include everything pertaining to that individual or subject: e-mails, scraps of paper, matchbooks, business cards and interview notes.

Which brings me to the second item: However laborious, I transcribe every interview, moving it from the scribbled notepad to the computer hard drive, and then print it out for easy annotation. I have a fantastic research assistant who is willing to transcribe my notes, but I realize that it’s better that I do it myself. The act of transcribing helps to reinforce what I learned in my interviews and it reminds me what needs following up.

That brings me to point three: I keep a running list of reminders. During the course of reporting and researching a business book, innumerable facts and questions and little but important shreds of information cross the transom, and they can easily be lost in the ether unless you are keeping tabs.

A close corollary to the reminder list is the weekly itinerary, a printed document in which I itemize each person to interview, facts to check and papers to review. In addition, I keep a running journal of ideas and notions and miscellaneous quotes and suggestions and activities. I also take scores of digital photos of people, places and things to capture details I might’ve missed in my notebook during an interview or can’t remember: the hue of the sky, the placement of an earring. To top it off, I post index cards on a series of corkboards so I can visual the growing connective tissues of the organism that is the book.

When I’m done reporting and researching—and I never feel like I’m quite done since, after all, the gathering of information is endless—I proceed to put together a detailed outline of the book. This takes days—actually weeks. That’s because I go through every shred of information and insert salient items into the outline as I go. Then, finally, I’m ready to sit down to write.

All of this organizing may sound, well, cumbersome. It is. But what would be even more cumbersome—or insurmountable—would be to do none of it and then sit down to write a business book. That, to me, is the essential difference between writing such a book and writing about business for a newspaper. When you’re writing for a newspaper, deadlines often come fast and furious, and usually, you don’t have the time to organize information in the way that I’ve described. That is, unless you do in-depth investigations of business. Then the approach begins to look similar. The key is to delve deep—vertically, if you will—into a subject, not horizontally, or along on the surface. Following your own leads doesn’t require great skill; all it takes is an ability to master the information unfolding before you.

Alec Klein is a bestselling author and an award-winning investigative business reporter at The Washington Post.

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