The Enterprise Approach

By Henry Dubroff
March 6, 2009

With space at a premium in the print editions at daily newspapers, weekly business journals have become a default location for longer-form enterprise and feature stories.

Business journals, especially those in larger metro markets, are willing to run stories that jump. They have ample space for one or more stories of roughly 1,000 on a weekly basis.

Typically these longer stories are profiles or enterprise stories that look at several aspects of the economy or a business trend. Sometimes they are investigative pieces, typically based on public documents from a court or regulatory commission.

For serious seasoned professionals and younger reporters learning the ropes, the weekly business journal gives journalists an opportunity to have a pretty big stake in crafting their own stories and building their skills for the future.

This is not The New Yorker, where editors pore over long-form mini-books. It’s not exactly The Wall Street Journal's Page One desk, where stories go through multiple edits before they get on the page.

But a major story in most weekly business journals gets at least one serious look from a senior editor and then a second copy and style edit before it goes on the page. An investigative piece will often get looked over by a libel lawyer before it goes to press.

Increasingly there is a unique structure to these stories, which, if followed makes for a lively read. We use a lot of variations on this structure at the Pacific Coast Business Times, the weekly business journal for the Central Coast of California where I work.

Many of these techniques were pioneered by Kent Bernhard, editorial director at American City Business Journals in Charlotte, N.C., and developed by various writing coaches that ACBJ has used over the years.

The idea behind the longer-form weekly business journal story is to create the prose equivalent of a freight train with a strong lead and a nut graph or two that describe the ways the story is developing. That serves as the engine on the train.

The freight cars are two hundred to three hundred word mini-stories that follow after the “engine” with a relatively smooth, but clear transition. At our newspaper we often will use subheads to sharply define the transition from section to section. The mini-stories can expand on the main theme, put some new twists on it or even take alternative sides if there is a debate about the theme.

Modern freight trains don’t have cabooses. But in homage to my 1950s model Lionel toy trains, which I still run at Christmas to the delight of my granddaughter, a caboose on a business journal story is a great idea. It can add a little bit of a twist, or give the writer an opportunity to push the story a little or just add an obvious pun or turn of phrase to put a smile on the reader’s face. If you want to learn from the best in the business how to put an ending on the story, read the Economist. Or pick up a weekend edition of the Financial Times.

The business journal model for longer stories allows you to write with a lot of clarity, it provides a way to convey a lot of factual information without getting all tied up in knots and it is simple to teach.

At the Business Times, we cover three counties and a story structure like this allows us to do an 800-1000 word roundup story that that lets us take a county-by-county mini-look at our region.

We have used the same formula for enterprise stories on retail sales, home stats, the tourism outlook or the impact of California’s budget mess - in a way that covers a lot of geography efficiently. We recently used the same structure to look at how four different real estate meltdowns were having a great impact on one of our counties - San Luis Obispo.

That one story started a conversation about the future of the county’s economy that has resonated with top decision makers and elected officials. And we got several anonymous tips about one of the failed projects that sent us back to court records and campaign finance contribution lists.

The ability to accumulate facts and present them clearly and simply in a thematic way is giving business journals a piece of the commanding heights of local financial news. When you combine longer-form structured stories with quick breaking news bits on the web, even a small business journal can pull a lot of freight.

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism