Business Journalists at the Convention

By Henry Dubroff
August 27, 2008 04:50 PM

A stroll through five — count them five — media tents around Denver’s Pepsi Center at the Democratic National Convention offers an interesting look at business journalism.

The largest portion of one air-conditioned tent is occupied by The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones, demonstrating Editor-In-Chief Robert Thomson’s intent to compete heavily for political coverage with rival, The New York Times. The Times, with a large footprint in a tent at the opposite side of the convention hall, is sharing space with The Boston Globe.

Meanwhile, a fully-carpeted, well-stocked Bloomberg News nerve center, equipped for multimedia reporting, hints to Bloomberg’s intent to compete with operations like the Associated Press and Reuters.

Although the economy may be the dominant theme of this election, political reporters ruled the ranks of the 15,000 registered journalists. Among national financial magazines, only BusinessWeek has permanent working space inside the Pepsi Center.

For Denver media, business and political coverage were nearly indistinguishable during the convention week.

At the Rocky Mountain News, all of the business writers found new assignments, with finance reporter David Milstead covering economic issues and James Paton covering lobbyists. Jeff Smith, whose usual beat is telecom, covered the blogosphere.

Gargi Chakrabarty, normally an energy reporter, drew the plum assignment of covering bars and restaurants while veteran real estate report John Rebchook followed major politicians such as Teddy Kennedy.

The Denver Post sought to tap into the intersection of business and politics for its convention coverage. The paper’s finance reporter Aldo Svaldi focused on economic coverage. Greg Griffin, fresh from a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University, was juggling several assignments along with business writers Andy Vuong and Kimberly Johnson.

Although both newspapers produced daily special convention coverage sections, more intensive coverage was found on the Web. The Rocky Mountain News’ Business Editor Rob Reuteman said his staff had been trained in multimedia photography and instant messaging using Twitter.

At The Denver Business Journal, Editor Neil Westergaard leveraged his staff and data resources to produce “The Mile High Market,” a special report that provided an overview of the metro economy.

Publisher Scott Bemis arranged distribution of the report at a number of press and public locations. Staff writers Mark Harden was assigned to cover a kick-off party hosted by Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck, Denver’s most politically connected law firm.

One of the more clever pieces of business journalism at the Denver convention was an Aug. 26 story in The Wall Street Journal by Shira Ovide and Russell Adams, which looked at the hundreds of thousands of dollars spent by The Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News on convention coverage. They found that increased advertising revenue and circulation stemming from the coverage might be good for the bottom line.

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