Five Questions with...Rodney Brooks

By Kanupriya Vashisht
June 18, 2007 10:30 AM

Associate editor Kanupriya Vashisht conducted this interview with Brooks.

1 How is it different covering business stories for a national newspaper as opposed to a smaller, local publication?

It's different, not necessarily harder. You're likely to have more people following a company at the national level, and that makes the reporting somewhat easier. But at the same time, the competition is a lot more intense. And the stories can tend to be more complicated.

It's no longer a matter of putting a reporter on the Metro or in a cab. We have to have a decent travel budget. When it comes down to it, covering business is covering business, whether it on a local scale or a national scale. It's like covering politics and going from the City Council to Congress.

2USA Today's circulation more than doubles, from 2 million to over 4 million, on Fridays. What kind of business stories do you assign for the Friday section?

There are a few things we need to keep in mind when we make editorial decisions on Fridays. On that day, more than others, we tend to emphasize enterprise stories over hard news stories on the section front. The best comparison to our Friday paper is the Sunday paper in a traditional daily. The big difference is our newspaper is on newsstands for three days -- Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Friday is also the day we've chosen to emphasize our personal finance coverage. We run a number of personal finance features that day, including Managing Your Money. We've also started running the weekly auto review column. So we have a bunch of weekly features that we hold for that day.

But, the biggest thing that differentiates Fridays is the tendency to move the hard news inside and focus on the most enterprising stories available that day. We'll always tend to favor our own enterprise. We want to give readers something they're not going to find in other newspapers.

3 From having the highest circulation in print, to being one of the most popular newspaper Web sites, how do you manage to cater to both print and online audiences?

We're not making the same editorial judgments for both print and online, not yet. We realize the audiences are somewhat different. The print audience is, obviously older. And we're coming to find the fact that we have not cut our stock agate is turning into a competitive advantage on the print side.

We started merging the online and print staffs last year. It's a very long and complicated process. And we're still learning. At this point in the process, the most important thing we can do for our readers -- print and online -- is get the news to them the fastest way possible. That means when it comes to breaking news, our reporters are writing for usatoday.com first. The thing we will always have in common is the news. The same news judgments and values that drove people to the newspaper are also driving the online traffic.

4 Has the business section at your paper seen an integration of its print and online staffs? How has it affected your coverage?

The business news staffs are not yet fully integrated, but we sit together and we're starting to train print people to do additional things, like post stories online. And when news breaks, our reporters automatically think online first -- even on weekends. They tend to work with their regular editors to get stories on the Web site. We don't have Saturday and Sunday newspapers, so the Web site is the only way we can be competitive when (news) breaks on the weekends.

Our print reporters and editors have also gotten to the point where when we start projects (big or small), they get their online graphic and photo staffs involved at the start. Once they saw the amazing things that could be done online with graphics and video, it wasn't a hard sell.

5 In your experience as deputy managing editor, what kind of business/money stories resonate most with readers?

People love real estate stories, of any kind. People love car stories, of any kind. And people love people stories.

We did a story a few weeks ago on the impact of high gas prices on low income people. Our readers were actually writing us letters. They wanted to know how to contact the people in the story and send them money. When we use people to tell the stories, we are sometimes still amazed at the power and the effect it has on our readers. People can identify. They feel their joy and they feel their pain.

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