Business Sections Repeat Past Success

By Dick Weiss
April 20, 2007

With this edition, Dick's Picks marks its first anniversary spotlighting the best business stories around the nation. Having scanned the nation's newspapers and Web sites for many months, you begin to notice that some just seem to do it better week in and week out than others.

Our latest picks are all repeaters -- The Charlotte Observer, The Chicago Tribune and The Los Angeles Times. You might expect that the latter two would shine often given the resources they can bring to bear on a story. But you can also appreciate that they were doing it while there was considerable turmoil in their executive suites as the Tribune Co., owners of both the Times and Tribune, were put on the selling block. The Observer is a mid-size paper with very high standards. I know of no other paper this size that covers its business community as well. But I'm ready to be enlightened. Send me a note about a newspaper you admire, along with recent stories that might be as good as the ones here.

Note: Each headline contains a link so that you can read the stories online. Some sites will require you to register first. It's worth taking the time.

3 One Giant Heap For Mankind

John Johnson Jr. of The Los Angeles Times

Johnson takes readers on a winsome and fascinating tour through a salvage yard full of spent rocketry in, of all places, North Hollywood. "For almost five decades," he writes, "Norton Sales Inc. has been collecting the nuts, bolts and heat exchangers from the rockets that helped American astronauts shrug off the steely embrace of gravity." Note how Johnson juxtaposes the high-flown language of the space age with the gritty detail of the junkyard. His tour of the yard put pictures in his readers head. Many writers at my workshops complain that the editors "take out all my color." You'll see here how Johnson makes his "color" both economical and essential to his story.

2 Traders' Cries Silenced

Greg Burns of The Chicago Tribune

Times have changed at the Chicago Board of Trade with trading moving from the pit to computers. My only qualm about this story is that Burns does too little to explain how trading works for neophytes like me. But he excels at illustrating the psychological impact on the traders. Just as Johnson did in the LA Times, Burns takes you into a world both foreign and fascinating. "It was a strange melting pot," he says of the trading floor, "Nearly everybody was big, loud, white and male, quite a few were related and not all were honest. But the bond pit, part of a financial complex that traded 2.5 million contracts a day last year, enabled those with the talent to see and feel the market in a way computer screens could never duplicate."

1 Sold A Nightmare

Binyamin Appelbaum, Lisa Hammersly Munn and Ted Mellnik of The Charlotte Observer

This team of reporters used a mix of writerly techniques to expose the machinations of a local homebuilder that led to an ungodly number of foreclosures. The four-part series opens with a poignant, yet concise, scene-setter about one family's travail. Later it moves to an explanatory, but no less dynamic mode, as it lays out the case against the homebuilder. On the Web site, the Observer also provides interesting video and a long list of sidebars and news you can use.

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