Newsroom Reorganizations Provide Business Education Opportunity

By Chris Roush
July 2, 2007

I spent some time on the phone recently with a reporter from Creative Loafing, the alternative weekly paper in Atlanta, talking about the organizational changes in the newsroom at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where I was a business reporter from 1994 to 1997.

What struck me about the conversation was how little this reporter, who admitted to me that he primarily covered government and politics, knew about the business aspects of running a newspaper, or business in general.

For example, he asked me about what I thought about journalists at the paper signing agreements when they took the recent buyout offer that prevented them from talking negatively about the paper. I explained to him that such agreements are very common in the business world. He seemed surprised.

In addition, I told him that the paper's reorganization and asking journalists to reapply for their positions was happening all across the industry. It happened months earlier at my local paper, The (Raleigh) News & Observer, which is also coming to grips with the new media world. Again he was surprised, even when I explained to him that tactics such as reapplying for jobs are common in the business world when corporations reorganize.

The one thing that we agreed on was the loss of institutional memory from the reporters on the business desk who accepted the buyout. One had more than 40 years of experience in covering the Atlanta market. They can leave behind all of the source lists and phone numbers that they want, but they can't leave behind the memory of what types of stories those sources were likely to talk for, and what those sources know.

I'm no fan of newsroom reorganizations because they seem to be de-emphasizing the importance of business coverage at a time when more and more stories revolve around money and the economy.

But in cases like Atlanta, where the business desk is now part of a huge "News & Info" desk, I hope that the business reporters and editors take the reorganization as an opportunity to educate their brethren who have never written about finance.

If that happens, then the news reporters won't sound like they're ignorant of business topics and stories if they should happen to have to cover one.

And there will be fewer phone calls like the one I received.

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