Shifting Targets

By Jeff Bailey
April 16, 2008 01:33 PM

Newspapers stopped printing stock market tables, for the most part, a couple of years ago. But a heavy bias toward business news written for investors continues on many business pages, an approach that could be limiting, rather than expanding, reader interest.

I’d argue for more coverage that bypasses the investor point-of-view and instead aims the story at either employees or at consumers.

Why? For starters, most households these days invest via mutual funds, owning hundreds of stocks indirectly. That means company-specific coverage tailored for investors is of less use. Thus, while the reason newspapers cut out stock tables was to save on newsprint costs, they were in fact belatedly catching up with readers’ habits (with the exception of a few die-hards who liked to run their fingers over a column of p/e ratios).

What’s more, as sophisticated markets coverage has proliferated on financial news services and on the Internet, it has become harder and harder for dailies to regularly pull together staff-written investor coverage that rises above the din.

If you can’t do it best, don’t do it, in an era when the Internet allows readers to so easily find the best – and ignore everything else. And if you think you still need it, pull if off the wires, and save your staff for something you can truly excel at.

How local companies – and the national and international industries they are part of – connect with workers and consumers is, in many cases, a coverage area that is wide open.

Sure, led by USA Today, papers have vastly increased business coverage for and about consumers, though that coverage area is far from saturated. Much less has been done to cater to employees, though they represent large audiences and can be identified and targeted.

And with the boom in leveraged buyouts taking so many big companies private (though often with remaining public filing requirements, thankfully), at more and more companies there is no stock to write about.

In the Chicago area, where I live and work, Abbott Laboratories employs about 13,000. Motorola has a similarly-sized local payroll. And there are dozens of other major employers, many with highly-educated workers. Potential newspaper readers, in other words. And some smart coverage of their work place might turn them into loyal ones.

I’ll admit I’ve become super-sensitive to employees as story topics while covering the airline industry the past two years. It’s not a business many investors would buy and hold stock in, given the awful ups and downs and many bankruptcies. But how airlines treat customers, of course, is a great and continuing story, and I’ve done my share of those.

With an often-angry workforce of unionized workers, it’s also an industry dying to talk about its working conditions. And, in addition to the nearly half a million workers in the industry, many airline customers seem interested in the plight of the employees, too, because they know unhappy workers can make for bad service.

Still, even covering airlines – and certainly in most other industries – there are strong forces that push a reporter, even unknowingly, to orient coverage toward investors. For one thing, our best source of company information, Securities and Exchange Commission filings, are written as disclosures for investors. Analysts, the all-purpose experts we call too frequently, also aim their work at investors. And executives at publicly-traded companies have grown increasingly focused on their stock price since the 1980s takeover boom scared them all out of their pinstripes.

Also, stock prices move dramatically on corporate news, and we all like to have some action in our stories.

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This default to an investor focus can be seen in straight-forward news coverage in the Chicago Tribune’s business section, which does a better job than most. A January 20 story about Baxter International’s improved performance offered proof in a sub-head: its stock was near an all-time high. On January 15, a piece about problems at Sears likewise relied on the stock price, in a sub-head, for oomph: “Shares lose 5% …”

There’s nothing wrong with these stories and, in fact, stock prices remain a handy shorthand for a company’s relative performance.  But the market’s verdict is so instantaneous, and so unambiguous, we frequently give only generalized descriptions of a company’s service or product failings, or successes. And we’re even less likely to connect performance to the lives of workers.

In a month of business section fronts, roughly 135 stories, I counted ten Tribune pieces I’d call employee-focused, two of them about layoffs at the rival Chicago Sun-Times. “We have to appeal to all sorts of people,” Jim Kirk, the business editor, told me, and with only 16 reporters.

There has been some great journalism in this area, of course: Pulitzer Prizes in 2004, 1998 and 1995 on unsafe work conditions. And one in 1991 on the impact of a leveraged buyout on employees. Highly sophisticated financial coverage, meanwhile, has unearthed questionable pension practices by many employers in recent years.

But generally, writing about companies as employers is hard as companies often try to keep reporters away from workers.  Yet, it’s not impossible. Chat boards, many of them ironically set up for investment talk, are often full of employees airing their beef. And just hanging out at industry conferences and other meetings where workers are present, handing out your business card – “story suggestions welcome” – can bring great contacts.

But the best way, I’ve found, to meet workers in an industry is to write something about their plight. (example articles: Fliers Fed Up? Airline Employees Feel the Same, Now Departing: Airline Careers) That inevitably brings a bunch of e-mails, telling me more about the topic, and then I’ve got potential sources for future coverage.

Jeff Bailey is a business reporter for The New York Times

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