Trusted Lists

By Jeff Bailey
October 20, 2008 04:33 PM

There are plenty of reasons for business writers to resent the spread of lists – Fortune 500, Forbes 400, and all their varied offspring in magazines, newspapers and weekly business journals – especially now.

With news holes shrinking, lists can seem to be crowding out your carefully-reported stories. And to many hard-bitten reporters, lists amount to pandering to readers’ laziest instincts: it can seem a short leap from “Six Ways to Thinner Thighs to “Eight Stocks to Own Now” to “America’s Most Admired Companies.”

Perhaps most galling of all to reporters, the darned lists are so popular with readers (and advertisers). Rankings, like the U.S. News & World Report lists fly off the newsstands.

But I’d argue that lists, far from maddening, ought to be among a business writer’s best friends. They provide compelling and ready-made story ideas – if only we take the time to peruse the lists carefully.

By definition, lists provide comparative data, so that when the CEO of an oil-and-gas services company tells you that it’s brilliant management behind his company’s rising profits, you can see that either just about every company in that industry is run by a genius or just maybe the CEO has had the wind at his back.

Most importantly, though, profile subjects and examples – interesting and important companies and people you’ve never heard of – are served up on lists.

My two personal favorites are the Forbes 400 of wealthiest Americans and the Inc. magazine 500 of fastest-growing privately-held companies.

The Forbes 400 is, at this point, entirely made up of billionaires, so any significant change in business or personal fortunes for one of its members is going to be newsy. Many of its members are surprisingly unknown to the public, meaning your story could plow new ground. And these lesser-known billionaires and their business empires often provide great stories, as Forbes itself proves year after year.

This year’s fabulous profile of Gary Michelson, by David Whelan, – how Michelson collected his fortune in patent disputes and now shares it with four-legged creatures – is a reminder that you don’t have to be buttoned-down to be successful in business.

But Forbes can’t do ‘em all, which leaves plenty for the rest of us.

Renae Merle, a business reporter covering financial markets for The Washington Post, was a colleague of mine at The Wall Street Journal in 2001 when she began studying the Forbes 400 for little-known billionaires and then looking into their stories. Her April 19, 2001 page one piece on William Cook, who has a fortune Forbes these days estimates at $5 billion, revealed his odd obsession with drum-and-bugle music.

While reading the Forbes list, “the guy just popped out” Renae recalls.

The Broadway show he bankrolled, “Blast,” got panned by critics, but his desire to talk about it before opening night gave Renae unusual access to the then-70-year-old entrepreneur.

Renae seemed to have a thing for billionaires who like marching bands. She also profiled Harry Quadracci and his Quad/Graphics Inc. printing company on May 14, 2001. At the time, Forbes pegged his net worth at $780 million, and he spent some of it staging the musical, “H.M.S. Printafour,” and himself playing the lead. Her piece revealed an aggressive entrepreneur with some unconventional personnel policies.

It’s also worth noting the prosaic industries that produce billionaires – billboards and public storage units, to name two – and that might suggest looking into your local billboard or public storage entrepreneur.

The Inc. magazine list is quite different, annually showing what types of companies are growing most rapidly. It’s a way to see what’s hot in the economy. (Full disclosure: I write regularly for Inc.) The list is a good source of examples for broader economic coverage and for industry stories.

Another good source of smaller-company examples is the Central Contractor Registration site where smaller companies doing business with the federal government are listed and searchable by locale, industry, size, minority status and other factors. (Beware: much of the CCR listed information is out of date, so you need to check it carefully with the company.)

Including smaller companies – rather than just Fortune 500 behemoths – brings depth and often some surprises to stories. The CEOs typically hop right on the phone to talk. And you’ll get a more candid assessment of what’s going on in an industry.

The Inc. list can also be unusually valuable during tough economic times like these. How are the financial services companies on the list holding up in the wake of Wall Street’s collapse? Ditto for the real estate companies on the list. They were booming as of Dec. 31, 2007, but what happened since? Rapid growth can often leave companies vulnerable and short of cash.

For some of the retailers on the Inc. list, this may be their first serious economic downturn. How will they handle it as consumers turn frugal? That sounds more compelling to me than gauging how big and established retailers might ride out a recession.

Comeuppance is also a compelling story line. And after a company featured on a most-admired, best-managed or best-performing list tanks, the list itself and any accompanying article can show the company’s hubris during the good times.

And it doesn’t hurt to compare companies that appear on a best-place-to-work-for list, say, to those that draw lots of angry employee comments on sites such as www.jobvent.com.

Most of these lists are available online. But I find them difficult to peruse that way. So, if you’re a subscriber to these magazines, I’d recommend you save the editions with the lists. I have Forbes 400, Inc. 500 and quite a few others going back several years.

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