Five Questions with...Josh Mills

By Kanupriya Vashisht
May 29, 2007 9:08 AM

Associate editor Kanupriya Vashisht conducted this interview with Mills.

1. How did you develop your interest in covering the business of sports?

I've been a sports fan for decades, and about a decade ago I started wondering why so much public money was being spent on stadiums that make money for multimillionaire owners. The more I read, the more puzzled I was. This led me deeper into public policy issues first, and eventually into a broader look at the sports business generally. This introduced me to the brilliant work of sports economists like Brad Humphreys of the University of Illinois and Andrew Zimbalist of Smith College -- great resources for journalists.

2. How can sports business coverage be improved?

First, you need to want to do it, and assign a reporter to this beat. Too many sports editors and writers are fascinated by game play and personalities and don't see the opportunities for strong coverage that readers will want to hear -- how tax money is spent, how public power is used to condemn properties, who benefits and who loses, and a host of consumer-related issues, such as ticket pricing and scalping, merchandising and broadcast rights.

Second, you need reporters who understand how to read a budget, a contract and a prospectus for a bond offering. Such skill is not widely held within a traditional sports department. So you need to provide training to these folks, and their news organizations need to give them time off to attend such training.

Third, department heads or managing editors should form newsroom teams, consisting of a sports reporter, a business reporter and a statehouse or public policy reporter.

3. Speaking more generally, what should universities be doing to better train and prepare journalism students to be capable of covering business stories?

Simple answer: find qualified business journalists to teach business journalism courses. More complex answer: find ways to integrate the principles and tools of business journalism into a broad range of courses, because major business and economic issues find their way into political reporting, health care and education reporting, culture reporting and so on. It comes down to training.

4. How has journalism school curriculum adapted to changes in technology as for how news is researched, reported and presented? Has enough been done in this regard?

Many journalism schools do a superb job. Some have even been out in front of the industry -- their best students know things that hiring editors they're talking to are only beginning to understand. Other journalism programs do less well, either lacking the resources or the savvy faculty to adapt. It's hard to teach what you don't understand.

5. How should business journalism students market themselves?

As journalists who can tell a fair, accurate, balanced story about how things work -- whether it's how a crop gets from the field to a restaurant table, which books get displayed in a store and which don't, why a museum decides to feature certain artists and not others, why local governments are subsidizing one form of the entertainment business (sports) at the expense of others, or all the traditional business stories involving employment, innovation, marketing, product developing, M&A and earnings.

Josh Mills is in charge of the Reynolds Center "Covering the Business of Sports"; workshops in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles in fall 2007. He is director of the master's program in business journalism at Baruch College/CUNY in New York City. He also spent a decade as an editor and reporter at The New York Times. He has been a reporter for a number of other newspapers and has written articles for publications such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.

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