Mining Mentors

By Kelly Carr
January 28, 2008 04:10 PM

Trace Christenson scared me. So during my first few months at The Battle Creek Enquirer, I stayed away from him. Trace had been at the Michigan newspaper for 20 years, mostly as a cops and courts reporter. He covered all the big stories, had hundreds of sources and established a foul-proof system to search documents.

My desk had no archived papers. This was my first full-time news gig, and I was thrown right in. When assigned an accident or a business story, I didn’t know what I was doing. At first, I tried to pretend I knew everything, asking no one for guidance. It was cooler, I thought, to act as if I had it all figured out.

With the recent turmoil in the newspaper industry, my experience is becoming more common. Training programs, in many cases, have slowly disappeared. But that doesn’t mean we can just be idle.

“People who wait for others to come to them could be waiting a long time,” said Jodi Schneider, economics editor for Congressional Quarterly. “In newsrooms, we know who knows certain things. We can say, this person understands the economy and this person is good with court documents. Most people are happy to talk about what they know.”

But they won’t talk, if we don’t ask.

We have to take responsibility for our own career development. We must force ourselves to assess our strengths and weaknesses, and then look around at the people we work with every day and ask ourselves what they can teach us.

At that first job, when I was handed a press release about Blake Wilson, a 12-week-old infant who had died at the home of his daycare provider, I was stuck. It was a crime story, and I wasn’t sure how to tackle it. I went to Trace. He helped me take my reporting a step further, and under his guidance, I wrote a two-day series highlighting Michigan’s lax daycare laws.

When I landed a job at The Arizona Republic a year later, I took everything Trace had taught me to that newsroom. My first day in Phoenix, my new editor introduced me to Charles Kelley, dubbed the best writer in the newsroom. And so it continued. Chuck taught me how to incorporate narrative detail into my stories. Veteran reporter Pat Flannery showed me how to obtain documents officials try to hide.

As business reporters, we have a lot of ground to cover. The beat requires constant education. We should read veteran business journalists’ stories and pick their brains. Experts like Michelle Leder, a freelance journalist who set herself apart as a guru of SEC filings, and New York Times reporter Leslie Wayne, one of the best at campaign finance. But there are also people inside our newsrooms, maybe nowhere near the business desk, that can help fill vital gaps to make us better reporters.

Hanah Cho, a business reporter at The Baltimore Sun, said she never stops asking questions. Day after day, she realizes the value of surrounding herself with mentors both inside and outside her newsroom.

“I basically have no shame. I ask the most random questions,” Cho said. “Sometimes I just ask a question out loud, and I have five different people giving me answers and helping me out.”

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