Five Questions with... Paul O'Donnell

By Kanupriya Vashisht
May 7, 2007 11:07 AM

Associate editor Kanupriya Vashisht conducted this interview with O'Donnell.

1) What are the biggest trends you see in business sections?

Certainly the biggest worry across the industry is maintaining freestanding business sections as stand-alone sections. There are many rumblings of big papers planning to collapse their business sections into other sections of the paper.

Strong business reporting is critically important today, especially in a changing market like Cleveland. And as consumers are forced to make more and more of their long-term investment decisions or take control over spending for their own health care, business sections that provide a steady diet of consumer-oriented news will have utility to readers for years to come.

2) How is online affecting your business staff and your overall coverage?

For two years now, we've placed a lot of emphasis on being first online with breaking business news in Cleveland. We're competing in the online space with a weekly business publication that uses its web site as an outlet for daily news. Our reporters readily accepted the challenge and we're putting a dozen or more news stories online each day. We're winning that battle.

We're also moving more and more into multimedia. One of our deputy business editors produces a weekly podcast on local business topics that can be downloaded or streamed (http://www.cleveland.com/weekenddiary/) and I conduct videotaped interviews with local CEOs that are posted on our web site and used as an online extra to our regular print interviews with chief executives (http://www.cleveland.com/ontherecord/). All of our reporters are getting more comfortable using digital recorders, allowing us to post audio from key interviews or news conferences.

We're using our web site as an infinite catalog of some of our popular print features or special sections. For example, we published a 12-page special section in February on preparing for that annual rite of doing your income taxes. Since people work on their taxes right up until the April filing deadline, we decided to put the whole section online (http://www.cleveland.com/taxguide/) and we regularly promote its availability from the print edition. Putting the section online also allowed us to add some special touches.

One of the section's most popular features is our personal finance writer's side-by-side comparison of the leading commercial tax software programs. We enhanced that feature with audio of her describing her experiences as she test-drove the software.

3) What do your readers seem most interested in reading about?

Local news, of course. Cleveland is a big small town. Our print and online readers are extremely interested in knowing about the companies they work for as well as the region's overall effort to remake itself as manufacturing jobs and operations continue to shift to lower cost countries.

To illustrate my point about the draw of news, take our staff's coverage of a recent breaking story about an international banking executive at KeyCorp who was charged with embezzling $41 million by writing more than 100 fake loans over a nine-year period. The story was compelling on many levels, right down to the double life led by the executive -- complete with a newly-purchased multimillion-dollar home in the Hamptons for his New York fiancee, and an ex-wife and two children in one of Cleveland's nice family-oriented suburbs.

Cleveland is a strong banking community, with two of the nation's larger banks headquartered here. So with each day's developments, the embezzlement stories racked up big online hits and generated a steady stream of calls to the newsroom.

Generally speaking, Cleveland is a city in economic transition. It's a region where the auto, steel and grocery store industries have gone through tremendous consolidation and downsizing. That means there are a lot of unemployed people trying to learn new skills so they can find decent-paying jobs to support their families. We're about to kick off a feature that profiles workers in transition. We think that will resonate with our readers.

We've also started monthly features that profile entrepreneurs taking risks by starting new businesses from scratch, that document local businesses' efforts to incorporate sustainability into everyday practices, or that give a glimpse behind the strategies used by some of region's leading retailers. And with interest universally high in executive compensation, we started a feature this year that tracks CEO pay at Cleveland's leading publicly-traded companies.

All of these were a response to reporters or editors on our staff spotting trends or needs in the local business community. Understanding your market is vital.

4) How do you give your section a distinctive feel and personality?

We constantly look for stories that stretch the traditional boundaries of what most people would consider business stories. For example, our auto writer recently did a centerpiece on car maintenance needed to transition from a Cleveland winter to spring. It's the kind of centerpiece that readers love because it hits them where they live. And it's the kind of centerpiece that might get a casual reader of the newspaper to stop at the Business section, instead of cruising right on by to the sports section or comics.

We also have two columnists who regularly answer reader questions or try to solve reader problems -- one on personal finance issues (http://www.cleveland.com/business/tmurray/) and the other on consumer concerns (http://www.cleveland.com/business/plaindealer/sheryl_harris/). Both write with strong and authoritative voices, and both get more reader inquiries than they could ever hope to handle.

We also produce three special sections each year that are written and edited from a consumer perspective. This year's sections are on taxes and tax preparation, home buying and selling, and job hunting. These sections are extremely popular with readers, often resulting in reprint requests or calls for extra copies. And they regularly win journalism contests, too.

5) What are the biggest challenges for a business editor in 2007?

The biggest challenge facing business editors today is no different than it is for any other newspaper editor -- properly managing the shift of our resources to the online world, while not turning our backs on loyal print readers who will go to their graves preferring the newsprint version of what we do. There is no singular response to that challenge. Newspaper editors really need to understand the market they're serving and pace that change accordingly.

Paul O'Donnell has been The Plain Dealer's business editor since April 2005. His staff of 18 covers two dozen Fortune 1000 companies based in Cleveland or its surrounding region. He joined The Plain Dealer in 1990 and served as a bureau chief and deputy metro editor before becoming business editor.

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Two Projects O'Donnell would like you to check out

1) An exhaustive eight-part series in summer of 2006 on the nation's impending retirement crisis. It was called “Retire at Your Own Risk.” About half of the business staff worked on the series, which just won a national financial journalism award. Full PDFs of the series are available at http://www.cleveland.com/retirement.

2) Graphics highlighting CEO pay as companies file their proxies this year. This has developed quite a following, prompting reader calls, letters to the editor and comments. The graphics are being cataloged at http://www.cleveland.com/ceopay.

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