Writing a business story for broadcast is tricky, as your audience may be distracted with other things in their lives. So your delivery style is different from traditional print journalism. In this week’s How to Cover Money podcast, co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard talk with senior business reporter, Ben Bergman from KPCC Los Angeles about how to cover business journalism as broadcasters. Ben Bergman of KPCC grapples with a unique issue covering business for broadcast. “We’re always told in radio, ‘don’t use any numbers. Take the numbers out of your story.’ And of course what is business about but numbers?” asks Bergman. “So the challenge is having enough numbers to have the heft of your story, but also make it interesting.”
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money, Ben Bergman with KPCC Los Angeles, tells us a thing or two about business for broadcast.
Ben Bergman: We’re always told in radio, don’t use any numbers. Take all the numbers out of your story. And of course, what is business about but numbers?
Maynard: Hello and welcome to the Reynolds Center podcast. We’re coming to you from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. We’re based at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. I’m Micki Maynard, Director of the Reynolds Center, and with me is my co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite alum and a reporter and anchor at KTAR News. Hello Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki. Today we bring you Series 2, Episode 2 of How to Cover Money. In this episode, we’re getting some advice from Ben Bergman, who’s a well-known voice on Public Radio. He’s the senior reporter for business at KPCC in Los Angeles, and you’ve also heard him on NPR programs and on Marketplace.
Maynard: Ben joined us this January for Reynolds Week, which is our annual boot camp for journalists and business reporters. You can find the highlights from Reynolds Week on our website, businessjournalism.org and we’ll be taking applications this fall for Reynolds Week 2016.
Remillard: We’ve made a lot of the differences in how to cover money for radio and print. And Ben is pretty well versed in, obviously, in covering it for radio. And so we started off by asking Ben, what’s the hardest part of covering business on radio?
Bergman: Probably the hardest part is that we’re always told in radio, don’t use any numbers. Take all the numbers out of your story. And of course, what is business about but numbers? So the challenge is having enough numbers to have the heft to your story, but also make it interesting. And I think characters, of course, are a great way to make your stories more compelling and to tell stories, but you also do need some numbers, just not too many.
Maynard: We talked in Series 1 about David Kandow, who is known as the host whisper at NPR, and his favorite saying was “Somebody doing something for a reason,” and that’s what Ben means when he’s talking about characters in a story. Maybe the story is triggered by numbers. Maybe Apple has announced a record profit, and they’re going to hire 5000 people, and maybe you want to go and find somebody who’s applied for Apple. So that might give you an opportunity to tell a story about Apple hiring, but you have to tell it through the eyes of someone who’s interested in a job at Apple.
Remillard: Yeah, you don’t always have to just focus on a narrative or something in radio. You can put some numbers in there, but as you said, there’s a balance that you have to find.
Maynard: I just participated in judging business entries for the Scripps Howard Contest, which is very elite set of awards that are given out every year by the Scripps Howard Foundation. And one of the things that I found in reading so many business stories is that it’s numbers, numbers, numbers, conclusion, numbers, numbers, numbers, conclusion. But I wasn’t seeing as many characters. So I can’t stress enough how important it is to put characters in your business stories if they’re on the air or in print. You just have to go find those people. And I know that that can be tough.
Remillard: There’s another challenge in covering business, especially on radio or print. But Ben told us one of the biggest challenges that he faces is the challenge of just getting information.
Bergman: The toughest part I find about business is sometimes the lack of information, especially covering non-public companies, because a lot of the people at my organization cover governmental agencies and school districts and politicians, and there’s a lot more an expectation of sharing, or you have to share stuff because you can file a request for that information. Whereas, you know, covering Uber, they don’t really have to give me anything and they don’t. So that’s a challenge being a business reporter.
Maynard: We give a lot of tips on our website about how to cover private companies and how to find numbers on companies that are just not cooperating with you, and I can just imagine how hard it must be to do that for broadcast. I mean, it’s hard enough to do it for print and then doing it for broadcast. I mean, I made a transition a few years ago from The New York Times to Public Radio, and it was really difficult, because you were used to just sitting down at a computer, writing something, and you’re done. With radio, you have to find people, you have to find tape, you have to find information. What’s kind of interesting is that Ben was also an intern at The New York Times, and he knows exactly what it’s like to make the same leap that I did.
Bergman: Print writers, you read these leads in The New York Times, and they have so many clauses and just when you’re listening you don’t get that, and you always have to think about like, when are you listening to the radio? It’s rarely just in a room only focused on that. It’s when you’re driving to work, it’s when you’re getting ready, when you’re making your coffee, when you’re dealing with your kids. So I think you have to remember that when you’re doing the story. It’s interesting, because at the very beginning of my career, I did do print journalism, and then I went to NPR, and of course, the transition there was much more conversational. And I worked a lot with Steve Inskeep, the host of Morning Edition, and he taught me to really have the shortest sentence possible. If he has a line that’s longer than one line, he’ll put a period there and cut it off. And I think we’ve talked about that a little bit when we’ve covered or when we’ve done some podcasts on doing business for the radio and and that’s kind of the radio 101 thing is the thought that your your listeners attention is not always directly focused on what you’re talking about. And I think that’s part of why he was, part of why he brought up what Steven Inskeep says about making sure that things are as simple as possible, because you’re kind you can be half listening. And if you bog it down with too many numbers and things like that, your listener is not going to catch all that, especially if they’re doing other things. And I think, if I recall from our first series you talked about, you know, it takes about three seconds for the brain to catch up, so you have to make sure that you’re keeping things fair, accurate, and, like you said, simple. And yeah, you just need to make sure that your listeners can keep up with you, radio is 24 hours constant.
One of the other things that broadcast reporters have to do, though, is they have to work with hosts of shows. A lot of times we’re just looking at our piece of the story, and we forget that someone else is going to be setting it up. And so Ben also had some tips about working with hosts.
Bergman: I think it’s in the story telling and in the writing, and it’s about grabbing people’s attention right away. And I think a lot of people forget about the host intro. That’s very important. People often do that as an afterthought, and they sort of throw it together. But as someone who’s now both a reporter and a host, I think that in some ways you have to have your best stuff give it away to the host, because that’s what’s really grabbing people’s attention.
Remillard: And I think that just from my end, being in having worked in the commercial world, I think if you’re out there listening as well, I think when he’s saying by host can also be the anchor as well. The anchor lead into a story. And that’s tough to do. It’s hard because I want to be the one who says the important part, but sometimes you really gotta grab their attention, like you said.
Maynard: Absolutely. So if you’re trying to keep score here, here’s what everybody has to do in broadcast. They have to find a character. They have to weave in the numbers so they don’t put you to sleep. They have to do great storytelling, and they have to write a script that sets it up for the host or the anchor. And on top of all of that now, you know, we’re used to thinking of broadcast reporters as just talking, but now they have to write as well. Mark, tell us about the website that you write for.
Remillard: Yeah, web is a huge part of what we do now as radio reporters. I personally really like that. I think there’s a lot of older reporters that don’t, because all you’ve done is added more work to their day, same amount of stories they’re responsible for, but now you’ve added them writing a web story. But you’ve got to do, maybe for me, I might have to do three versions of each story for the radio so that it can run different times, and then you’re also going to write a web story. And so it’s two different animals you have to take care of. I personally like it because it’s some longevity, because the radio piece might only run for a couple hours and then it’s gone, but the web piece will stay up there, obviously, indefinitely, until your website is one day gone. I think that there’s two different animals there for sure. And Ben talks about how you have to, kind of, you have to be able to do both, but at the same time, what’s great for the radio is not always great for the web.
Bergman: Stories that will be good for radio sometimes won’t be good for web, and vice versa. And you know, not every story, sometimes I do stories that only appear on the web, and I don’t do at all for radio. And you know, sometimes I’ll do just a radio story and nothing for the web. And, you know, one of the main differences is that for the web, you know, people are coming and looking for that stuff. And so it has to be very specific, like, and I can reference a lot of other things like, so if I’m covering the sharing economy, I can, you know, do sort of a very particular story about that that would be more of interest to people who follow that.
Maynard: One of the biggest challenges, I think, for people in radio, at least, the way that I found it when I worked in radio, was that there’s this tendency for the web of just taking your radio script and pasting it into a WordPress and putting it up and pretending that that’s a news story. And we all know, especially on the print side, we all know that that’s not the case, because you don’t write conversationally the way you write for the eye. I do think there are some wonderful things about radio that are great for a printed story. For example, I had an editor at The New York Times, Adam Bryant, who’ve believed very much in one line leads – a lead is the beginning of a story. And so when you’re working in radio, a lot of times you want to come up with that one sentence that will get people’s attention, and it does work visually as well. So I guess if I were going to give radio folks some advice, it’s not you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when you take your script and turn it into a news story. But you have to remember to add context. You need to remember to add background. You can’t just say, “Hey, I reported on this a few weeks ago. Go look it up.” I mean, it would be helpful to the reader of a web story from a broadcast piece, if you would go to the trouble of repeating a paragraph from the piece that you did a week or so ago.
Remillard: And if we can also mention too we are talking as well about television, broadcast in general. A lot of times I’ll see some of the local market TV stations. You’ll watch their video and their script is exactly what their web story is and that should really not be the way things are done, radio or TV. Both are the same, I think, and both have now have the same reliance on the web, you know, either one. And we don’t really talk a whole lot about television, but broadcast in general, yeah, exactly. You need to go through and really take the time to write a second version that’s meant for reading, not listening.
Maynard: I actually think it’s, well, maybe it is, for me, easier to write the longer story than make a script out of it, than to take a script and grow it. But it depends on how much time you have and it depends on the resources that are available to you. Now, the one nice thing about the web is that you have room for the cuts that you didn’t use in your audio piece or your TV piece. So if somebody said something really interesting that you only had a minute and 30 seconds and you couldn’t use it, you can get it into the web story. I realize it makes it sound like being a broadcast reporter is a lot of work. I think all journalism today is a lot of work, and we all have to be multimedia reporters. And this is a great conversation about what it actually is like to be a multimedia reporter today.
Remillard: It’s a lot of work. There’s no getting around it.
That’s it for this episode of How to Cover Money. Thanks to Ben Bergman for joining us. Next time, we’ll be looking at covering the biggest generation since the baby boomers. We’re looking at millennials and money.
Maynard: Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. If you’re interested in more tips and story ideas, we’ve got something for you. Sign up for our Must Read Money stories. Every morning you’ll get our daily newsletter and you can use those to inspire your own pieces, and get a jump on the day. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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