Roush's Giftbag of Cool Business Features

By Chris Roush
Nov. 20, 2007

In the spirit of the upcoming holiday gift-giving season, I’d like to offer some presents to business journalists around the country.

These “presents,” mind you, aren’t actual gifts. They are five features from business media across the country that I have marked as favorites on the Internet.

In other words, they keep me coming back, week after week, wanting more. And in the world of business journalism, that’s all that we can hope for when it comes to attracting readers.

So I present these “presents” in the hope that other business media outlets will copy these ideas, or come up with unique ideas themselves that will keep business readers coming back for more.

1. The Chicago Sun-Times “mystery” occupation. This feature is called “What’s My Line?” after the old TV game show, and it asks a worker questions about their job. The idea is to guess what the person does before the end of the interview. It runs every Thursday, and I’m always on the Sun-Times web site reading it. If I’m good, I can guess the occupation from the headline.

2. The Asbury Park Press goes to work. This feature runs every Monday, and like the Fortune feature “How I Work,” it takes readers inside how people do their jobs every day. What I like about how the Park Press handles the “At Your Job” feature is that it asks the questions everyday readers want to know, like how much money people make and what ticks them off about their jobs. My all-time favorite: The interview with Santa Claus last Christmas.

3. The News & Observer’s “Taking Stock.” My wife will tell you I am no shopper. I let her take care of the needed household purchases. And yet I am mesmerized by the blog written by Sue Stock, the retail reporter for The (Raleigh) News & Observer, called “Taking Stock” where she chronicles how much money she has saved so far this year buying things on sale and using coupons. Tally so far to date: $4,104.16. Maybe it’s the cheapskate in me that keeps me coming back.

4. The (Cleveland) Plain Dealer’s Big Mistakes. As business journalists know, it’s hard to get businessperson to talk about the mistakes they have made in their careers. But every Monday The Plain Dealer runs a feature called “My Biggest Mistake” where an area executive talks about the biggest mistake they ever made. What keeps me coming back is what’s at the end of the story – how they fixed the mistake.

5. Atlanta’s Hometown Companies. This really isn’t a feature, but I like how The Atlanta Journal-Constitution makes it easy for online readers to get the news and information they want from the city’s biggest corporations: Coke, Home Depot, Delta and UPS. Maybe I’m showing my bias because I used to live in Atlanta and covered both Coke and Home Depot, but the pages on the AJC’s web site for these companies are outstanding and must-reads for carbonated sugar water or hardware store news junkies like myself. Sample the Coke page here, and the Delta page here.

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