Future of Business Sections Discussed at Anaheim Workshop

Twenty five business editors and journalists converged on the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim on Saturday to discuss the rapidly changing direction of business news in a workshop sponsored by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism.

The "The New Business Section: From blogs to HTML to 'round-the-clock coverage" workshop precedes the annual convention of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Topics such as blogging on business, multimedia platform approaches to journalism, and 24/7 news were presented by seasoned business reporters, editors and educators. MarketWatch Editor-in-chief Dave Callaway highlighted his luncheon presentation with a bold prediction for the near future.

"I am going to stick my head out there and say that within the next five years, we will see one mid-size to large daily go completely online," Callaway said. "Depending on how well it goes, that trend may continue with others following suit."

Todd Bishop, business reporter/blogger for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and Michelle Leder, editor of the financial blog Footnoted.org, led the morning discussion on blogging.

"Business bloggers have a huge advantage because there's a wealth of material in written documents," Bishop said. "But if you're going to have a successful blog in terms of traffic, it needs to have a niche."

Leder, who has also authored the book Financial Fine Print, cautioned against writing blogs with a long hand.

"In general, people are not used to reading very, very long," she noted. "Know your audience and who is reading the site. Oftentimes, it's a somewhat different audience from who is reading the paper."

Jane Stevens of the University of California, Berkeley offered participants a unique perspective on multimedia reporting in a Web-centric world.

She highlighted new approaches to telling a story, including the incorporation of games and social networking sites to enhance reporting mechanisms.

"The Web demands context and continuity," Stevens said. "It's much more than skills; it's a completely new way of thinking about things. We have to make journalism interactive, participatory and solution-oriented."

Jodi Schneider, economics and finance editor at Congressional Quarterly, and Aaron Curtiss, the Los Angeles Times' deputy innovation editor, addressed the issue of 'round-the-clock business coverage during the afternoon sessions.

"Competition is everywhere; your readers are in some way your competition," Schneider said. "You have to craft stories from a more sophisticated standpoint as far as what's important to readers. You are much closer to your audience and your sources than you used to be."

Curtiss said that journalists must adapt to the many different ways consumers are using the Web. He noted that when posting online, if warranted the Times will make a correction to any story that has been updated. His argument was that the same rules that apply to print products should apply to online business journalism as well.

He also said that if your coverage can't stand out, don't waste time trying to court a reader that has already read the story.

"If you can't do it differently, think about not doing it at all," Curtiss suggested. "Go to a story that no one else is working on."

Callaway said the future of the online financial news market is up in the air.

"Real-time news and distribution are the keys," he says. "The online news site market is at the beginning of a consolidation. Improvements in news gathering and delivery are going to speed this type of consolidation. We need to slice and dice the delivery of our news from e-newsletters to special hit sections. We're just scratching the surface in the way we are disseminating our news."

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