From the Bottom Up

By Jeff Bailey
October 3, 2008 05:09 PM

As business reporters, we’re trained to go right to the top. Get an interview with the CEO.

If a company is in crisis, see if outside board members (the CEO’s bosses) will talk. And for all stories, we want to question executives who are as highly-placed as possible.

It’s a smart approach. After all, those people are running the companies we’re writing about and either have the best information or can order their underlings to provide it to us. And quoting top officials brings a sense of authority to any story.

But, I’d argue for a second approach, especially in these tough economic times: simultaneously go straight to the bottom -- talk to ground-level workers at the company or in the industry you’re covering.

If you can get access (see box) to them, workers can often provide a far more candid assessment of how a company is performing than the unfailingly-optimistic CEO is likely to cough up.

What’s more, for many readers, what the employees are enduring personally – radically altered workplaces with jobs sped up to require more work, general anxiety as employer loyalty to workers evaporates, layoffs, reduced benefits and disappearing economic security – is often a good deal more compelling than what the suits in the executive suites are experiencing.

And to the extent readers are customers of an industry you’re covering, the ground-level workers are likely to have a much better feel for the plight of those customers – since they actually interact with customers.

I was fortunate to get access to workers’ gripes about their bosses at US Airways when reporting this December 2007 story for The New York Times. It showed airline employees sympathizing with the traveling public about the industry’s poor service.

US Airways executives, to their credit, freely provided the access.  They were in the midst of trying to turn around on-time performance and other service features at the airline. And one executive was particularly devoted to a no-holds-barred dialogue with employees. My interest had been sparked, in fact, by a Q&A column in the US Airways employee newsletter, which featured unusually blunt worker language.

Not every company prints those kinds of remarks, but many happily pass on internal newsletters to reporters. And even sanitized worker questions, or executive remarks, can tip you off about what’s driving workers nuts.

When writing about some airlines that were less forthcoming than US Airways, my first call often was not to the company but instead to unions representing the workers. Oh sure, union spokespersons and leaders are often just as “on-message” as company executives, in this case wanting to talk about the need for better pay and benefits and to rein in executive compensation. But when I got beyond those “officials” and connected to rank-and-file workers via union representatives, I often got the most useful account of why baggage goes missing at airlines or why flights are so frequently late.

While business coverage is often dictated by the size of a company, measured in revenue or stock market value, the number of employees (see Fortune 500’s 50 biggest employers) is just as important of a yardstick. Maybe more so in these times. A change in worker benefits at Wal-Mart (2,055,000 workers), for example, is going to be felt throughout the economy and could affect personnel practices at other retailers and grocery chains.

So, talking to workers can make for better coverage of a company or an industry. But I’d also argue that certain jobs – truck driver, nurse, security guard, teacher, carpenter, auto repair technician – are so widely held (see the Bureau of Labor Statistics Employment Projections 2006-2016, by detailed occupation:) that they merit coverage as important economic entities themselves. Many of these workers are on the edge economically.

Rather than start with a local company, say, scan the Labor Department list, pick a widely-held job classification that intrigues you and is in the news, find publicly-traded companies (regardless of where they’re based; you just need reliable industry information) that employ a lot of individuals in that classification for disclosure on industry conditions, and identify and interview people working in that field in your news market.

The nursing shortage has certainly drawn coverage, though mostly for what it means to health care institutions and patients, not so much for how it impacts the roughly 2.5 million registered nurses the Labor Department counts.

But stories dwelling on the career prospects, pay and working conditions of nurses would be closely read by them, their families and co-workers. In most communities, that’s thousands – if not tens of thousands – of potential readers. And well-educated ones. By focusing on the line of work, rather than a single hospital or clinic, stories could actually appeal to nurses all over the community.

I recently worked on a profile of the CEO of a big trucking company. One of the curses of that industry is a chronic truck driver shortage and driver turnover that exceeds 100 percent a year at many companies. Interviewing the drivers was fascinating. Most of the ones I talked to were middle-aged (there is a shortage of younger drivers), dangerously overweight from the combination of long hours behind the wheel and greasy truck-stop food, and desperately missing their spouses while on the road (contradicting the loner stereotype). But they make about twice as much driving long haul than they would in a job that would get them home to sleep in their own bed every night. It’s a tough bargain, with lots of personal and financial consequences.

And it’s a story just about any news outlet can lay claim to. Major trucking companies’ headquarters are spread around the country. And if your news market isn’t home to one, surely it’s home to a big trucking terminal operated by one of the big companies. The industry is suffering from a slowing economy and increased competition from railroads. And every trucking company strategy to fight off those problems relies on one group – the drivers.

Jeff Bailey, a former Wall Street Journal and New York Times reporter, writes for national business magazines. He lives in Chicago.

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