The benefit of biz blogs

Still have 30 or 40 minutes a day that you aren’t glued to a portable electronic device?

If so, I can fix that for you: Add a few more blogs to your daily digital diet.

Blogs by analysts, insiders and enthusiasts can add a dimension to your reporting and help spark story ideas you wouldn’t get from more formal communication.

Corporate-sponsored fora, like Direct2Dell, obviously are going to be the most bland and sanitized, but still may alert you to event and product news.

And - especially if you cover multiple beats - blogs by sophisticated industry observers actually can serve as signposts that help you sift the issues and remain focused on key topics.

If you’re trying to incorporate secondary beats into your workload – say you’re an airlines reporter with an interest in IT, for example, but no time to report on it – monitoring blogs can help you keep abreast of the industry buzz until time permits a more in-depth look.

Blog-watching is, of course, no substitute for primary information-gathering – you still must perform the customary due diligence when preparing your own reports. Some blog operators are just gadflys and self-promoters, but others truly are authorities in their fields and might even merit a call or a quote. Just proceed with caution and be aware of the bloggers’ biases.

Here are a few specific sites I recommend:

• Fiat Economics is a timely, brisk, somewhat technical blog by Michael McDonough, an analyst and contributor to TheStreet.com. It’s especially helpful for his look-ahead columns that often run on Friday.

• Jalopnik is the daily go-to site for journalists on the automotive beat, with its mix of product news and corporate gossip. And at General Motors Corp., the FastLane entries by industry guru Bob Lutz is always an amusing read.

• The Consumerist is a watchdog blog now owned by Consumer Reports – sort of “The Daily Show” of consumer advocacy, with an irreverent wit but very timely and incisive skewering of corporate news, mis-steps and customer-relations faux pas.

If you have access to a Wall Street Journal online subscription, several of its blogs are worth note:

• The Numbers Guy is often, but not always, business-centric, these fascinating entries pick apart the numbers behind the headlines. Especially helpful for those who are math-phobic.

• The Health Blog offers an at-a-glance daily digest of the topics du jour on one of the hottest business beats, and a font of interesting feature stories.

• Bankruptcy Beat from the editors of the Dow Jones Bankruptcy Review; not only is it a great source of news, it’ll give you ideas on spinning off bankruptcy stories on your own turf.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Anniversary tales -- once more with feeling

This week marks one year since the first domino fell in what would become a series of financial collapses that have left few of us untouched – either as consumers, taxpayers, citizens or journalists.

Events surrounding Lehman Bros.' Sept. 15, 2008, bankruptcy have been and will be dissected ad infinitum. Here’s The Wall Street Journal’s succinct recap of where we’ve come since then, which is one way to cover an anniversary.

Then there’s last weekend’s impressive package by The Guardian. It explains the collapse from a U.K. point of view, including video, audio, an interactive map showing the global ripple effects, editorials, narrative accounts of the days leading up to the failure and more.


In an irreverent vein, Bad Idea notes that a feature film, book, radio play and other productions to mark the occasion are under way.

And, it reports, Lehman Bros. itself has set up an eBay store to offload items with its logo, ranging from teddy bears to totes, umbrellas to – yes – a silver-plated baby rattle. I thought that was a joke but indeed there is an eBay seller named “thelehman store” – and ironically, it has a 99.5 percent positive rating from buyers.

All of the above are examples of imaginative, clever reporting that really adds texture and nitty-gritty detail to what could otherwise be a dull and dreary retelling.

If you decide to localize the global financial failure with a look-back, keep these points in mind. Should you be among the many communities that have experienced a failed or troubled bank, shoot for a meaty narrative or use alternative storytelling such as a chronology or graphic timeline.

And for the basics, here are previous tipsheets with hints on checking up on banks and covering bank failures.

Another option is to look for three to five local people whose financial lives have changed dramatically in the year since the Lehman collapse. Do vignettes on their stories with a short intro recapping the bigger picture and tying them to it.

The anniversary of Lehman points to the need to keep a tickler file of big local events -- a major plant closing, a wave of layoffs, the opening of a new mall or megaplex, the appointment of a new CEO -- and check back at appropriate intervals. How did things work out once the hype died down?

The key word in anniversary stories is that they actually tell a story. Well-done anniversary stories keep us from becoming entrenched in drive-by mode – covering crises and then moving on. But audiences connect with recap and “where are they now” features. They create a sense of dialogue and consistency that is well worth cultivating.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.

Checking up on local banks

Bank shares took an especially heavy beating in Monday’s stock market sell-off, and no wonder. Despite billions of taxpayer dollars spent on bailouts, financial institutions are failing at a pretty fast clip this year.

According to a report in Monday’s The Wall Street Journal, citing the FDIC, 77 banks have failed this year – five of them last Friday – and some 300 more are viewed by federal regulators as at risk.

And last week, the Congressional Oversight Panel supervising TARP bailout funds released this report warning that many banks are still holding troubled assets on their books.

The problem is particularly acute for smaller banks, the report says, because they hold more commercial loans, with a high default risk, and more whole loans, which also can be wiped out by default faster than a pool of securitized loans. Meanwhile, smaller banks don’t have the same access to capital as larger institutions.

“Given the ongoing uncertainty, vigilance is essential,” the report urges. They’re speaking to federal regulators, but as a journalist you should take this as a sign that your local banking institutions deserve a second look.

It’s not an easy task – banking and finance are complex disciplines with confusing and arcane accounting conventions, terminology, you name. Because they don’t produce ‘stuff’ or provide tangible services like hair cuts or computer repair, they record their numbers differently than those in other sectors.

For starters, here’s a very good article from Investopedia.com about analyzing a banking institution’s income statements, complete with explanatory graphics.

It explains how banks derive income – basically by taking deposits and lending the money out to others at a profitable interest rate. Major risks are that the borrower will default or that interest rates will fall and the bank be obligated to pay out more than it actually earns on loans.

Get to know the regulators at your state level; the National Association of State Credit Union Supervisors and the Conference of State Bank Supervisors can point you in the right direction.

Federal regulatory sites abound and you’ll need to dig to determine who’s in charge of specific companies in your market. The Web sites of the 12 Federal Reserve banks, as well as the federal Comptroller of the Currency, Office of Thrift Supervision and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. all offer other educational materials online.

One interesting place to start is this FDIC database; you can run a report by county or other parameters showing each financial institution ranked by market share of deposits. It’s a fast and convenient way to find out which institutions your readers trust the most with their cash.

Then, check those banks against the American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop’s BankTracker database. In addition to detailing how much TARP money specific banks received, the database – a synthesis of FDIC reports on thousands of banks -- depicts each institution’s ‘troubled asset ratio’ compared to its capital and loan-loss reserves. The closer those two figures, the riskier the bank’s situation and the numbers provide an excellent opening for interviews with local bank execs.

Come back to Your Daily Tipsheet each morning for advice on where to find sources, background and creative ways to make financial news and trends relevant to your audience.