In this week’s episode, co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard pivot get an editor’s point of view. Kim Quillen, the East Valley Editor of The Arizona Republic, shares her approach to business journalism and details her experience covering historic events like Hurricane Katrina and the BP oil spill. As an editor, Quillen highlights some of the common mistakes she sees from reporters and how reporters can avoid them. With business journalism ever-evolving, Quillen gives her insights for young reporters to break into the field and why they should.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money: The editor’s point of view
Kim Quillen: You really do have to think pretty analytically and be looking for stories. And I think developing that skill is something that you can take to another beat, a non-business beat, and kind of take off with it.
Maynard: 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 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: Hello Micki.
Maynard: Throughout Season 2 of our podcast, we’ve been talking to some top journalists for their tips on covering the money in every story. But for our next two episodes, we’re getting the editor’s point of view. Mark, why don’t you introduce today’s guest?
Remillard: We’re joined in the studio today by Kim Quillen, who’s the east valley editor of The Arizona Republic. She oversees coverage of a region within the Phoenix metro area that has a population of over a million people. Until recently, she was a Republic’s assistant business editor. Kim spent 15 years at the New Orleans Times Picayune serving, first as an assistant business editor and later as business editor. She was involved in the papers Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of Hurricane Katrina as well as the 2010 BP oil spill. She’s a native of Delaware and has a bachelor’s degree in economics and a master’s degree in journalism. Thank you so much for joining us.
Quillen: Thanks. Thanks for having me.
Maynard: I got to know Kim when I was teaching at ASU at the Cronkite school, and my business journalism students had to write stories for local publications, and one of the local publications was the Arizona Republic. So Kim came over to my class, and she brought story ideas for my students, and then over the semester she edited the stories that my students wrote. So this is someone who has a lot of experience working with young journalists. You know, a lot of them are just writing their first business journalism story. So what’s the basic advice that you give to them on how to approach stories about money?
Quillen: Sure, and I have to say that Micki’s students were great. I really enjoyed working with them. But to give give some advice to young business journalists, there are a couple of things that I usually point out to them. One is, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds and business coverage. So one piece of advice I always give them is to look for ways to make stories really relevant to readers. Don’t get lost in the corporate earnings and I mean, those are important, but always look for a way to bring a story back, if possible, to something that’s real to readers. Show them how it’s affecting their local economy and jobs, how it could help them with their personal finances. Any chance you have to make a story really real to readers, is something that you want to look for. The other little piece of advice that I’ll pass along to young business journalists is that numbers and math loom a little larger than they do in other non-business journalism beats. When you’re in business journalism, that’s just a part of it. So a couple of things when it comes to numbers, one, double-check and double-check to make sure you’re picking the right number out of an earnings report or an economic impact study. You know, always double-check your numbers and the math that you’re doing in a story. If you’re calculating a percentage change, go back and double-check all those things. And finally, regarding numbers, I think one tendency of young journalists is to load up numbers into stories. They’ve got them in a report, and it’s just easy to pile them into a story, because they’re looking to pad the story or draw on information that they have, but really try to hone down the numbers and pick the ones that are most relevant to readers. It’s easy to get overboard and and put tons of numbers in and readers just lose it.
Remillard: Then that’s some great advice. What are some of the common mistakes that you see?
Quillen: Sure, numeric mistakes and math mistakes are one, especially with younger reporters. Also spelling mistakes. People, especially starting out, don’t do that basic due diligence and double-check the spelling of a last name or a title of a person. So really, some of those basic double-checking things that people should be doing, really, that’s where people get tripped up. The second weak, I guess common mistake I see is just weak leads. You know, there are people are starting out writing leads. The leads aren’t as focused. They aren’t as well-crafted. Maybe they don’t tap into what the real news in the story is. So really honing leads and spending a little extra time on those is something I always suggest that people do.
Maynard: It was interesting, Kim, because after a couple of weeks of editing the stories that went on to you for the Arizona Republic, I noticed that my students were having trouble writing leads. They just didn’t know how to get into a story. And so actually ripped up the lecture that I had planned for that day, and I just did a seminar on how to write a lead. And I hope that the work improved from then on out. I know a lot of people took that very seriously. Mark was in that class, I guess I should mention that, and they they really seem to prove once they were given some guidance, but without that guidance, they just didn’t know what to do.
Quillen: Right. I think it’s scary when you’re a young reporter starting out, and you’ve got that blank computer page in front of you. Something about getting the lead down. You know, it’s something I myself go back and polish. I’ll write a little bit, and I’ll go back and refine the lead. It’s always kind of a work in progress.
Remillard: When you were in New Orleans, you led business coverage of two huge stories: Hurricane Katrina, the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Walk us through how editors approach these historic stories. Do you plan day-by-day, or is there an opportunity to set out a schedule of these stories that you want to tackle?
Quillen: Sure. That’s a great question. One thing I found is that a news event like the BP oil spill or Hurricane Katrina has a very different life cycle than most other news that you’re working on. You know, most days, if you come in and a company is merging with another company, there’s an immediate breaking story or two that you do that day, and then the next day or the next day you’re doing follow-ups. What does this mean? You know, you’re doing the big think pieces. When you’re covering a story like the oil spill or Katrina, you’re kind of in both of those phases at the same time. You’re always in that breaking phase, and you’re trying to do the think pieces, the bigger pieces that require a little extra time and a step back. For example, with the BP oil spill, that spill began on one day, but BP spent like, four or five months trying to contain that spill and to stop it. And they were trying all kinds of things. They were shooting like old tires down into the hole, literally trying to stop it. And they came up with all these other strategies. So each day we were kind of on a breaking news situation. We were cut, we had one person assigned every day to cover what BP was doing that day, to try to stop the spill. At the same time, we were trying to step back and do those bigger think pieces, looking at the environmental impact or looking at the industry-wide impact. So we were kind of on both tracks throughout that. We were on the breaking track and the step back and do a bigger think piece. And what, what I found in both situations was that we ended up developing sub-beats for people. For example, our tourism reporter, you know, she was covering tourism up until the BP oil spill, suddenly was the person who, every day, came in and wrote about what BP was doing that day. We had a separate reporter who really dove into piecing together what happened on, you know, on the rig, before the oil spill began. So people began, you know, they still had their normal beats, but they kind of were diverted into these specialized sub-beats within the oil spill. And by doing that, you know, they were able to navigate breaking news and bigger picture stories, which we kind of talked about on an ongoing basis.
Maynard: One of the interesting things about that story, watching it from up north, basically, was that it touched so many parts of journalism. You had the environment, you had the energy industry, you had tourism, as you just mentioned. I know there were a lot of stories about the fishing industry and what happened to that, and then it stretched all the way over to Florida, because the oil balls were showing up on the beaches in Florida. So do you find that having such a broad story helped kind of sustain your coverage?
Quillen: Yes, because there were lots of avenues to pursue in our coverage, and really, much of the staff became involved in the coverage at some point, because their pre-oil spill beats suddenly took on new life with the oil spill. There were all these new angles to chase.
Maynard: I remember when Hurricane Katrina happened, and it was the first time I had spent a lot of time on nola.com which is the website for the New Orleans Times Picayune. And obviously that might have been the moment when everybody realized how important the web would be. Now you’re here in Phoenix at the Arizona Republic, and you’re working in a true multimedia environment. So tell me what it’s like to be an editor in charge of both a print product and an online product.
Quillen: Yeah, what we’ve started doing is when we begin a story, when we conceive a story or assign a story, from the very beginning, we try to think about the story’s print life and its digital life, and both of those lives have different needs. When you’re focusing on the print side, you’re thinking about we need a great piece of still art to go with a story. Are there info boxes or infographics that we could put together for the print life of the story? And then separately, we’re thinking about the digital life of the story, and that may mean developing a video to go with it online, or a slideshow, or some other interactive digital component for the story. Maybe an interactive chart or something like that. And so and also, part of the digital process is thinking about the timing of it. When are we going to roll it out online? When are we going to roll it out on our mobile products? Are we going to develop a social media strategy for pushing the story? So from the beginning, we’re thinking about both tracks for a story and trying to optimize it for each medium, I guess.
Mayanrd: At the Cronkite school, the students are getting training and all of those expertises. So what do you look for when a young business journalist, or just a young journalist, comes over to the Republic and says, you know, “I’d like to be an intern, or I’d like to be hired as an entry level reporter.” What are the skills that you’re expecting them to have?
Quillen: One thing we like to see is just an aptitude for multimedia and social media. They don’t have to be experts in it, because some of the tools that we use are what you would consider proprietary tools. They’re tools that our parent company, Gannett has developed. So we wouldn’t expect a fresh candidate to have learned those tools. They might know their own version of how to create a slideshow. So as long as they have an aptitude or a willingness to embrace it, we can teach them the nuts and bolts of how to pull these off. We’re just looking for people who are willing to embrace that kind of coverage and and dig into it.
Remillard: Let’s talk about how business journalism is evolving. What kind of stories resonate most with your audience? Is there interest now in different, more interest now in things like personal finance stories. Do people want lists? What are you seeing as time is going on?
Quillen: That’s a great question, I think, and I think the answer may vary depending on who you ask. I think that one thing that is becoming more important is just high-quality journalism, journalism that’s well-reported and well-written and that is impactful and relevant in terms of the topic that it addresses. One thing I’ve noticed also is that business journalism is getting broader. It used to be like a couple decades ago, if you were thinking about going into business journalism, that meant you were going to be an expert on stocks and corporate earnings, and that’s still a part of it. But an example of the change is that the Associated Press last year stopped having their reporters write earnings reports. They now use an automated system that generates those reports, and it was sort of an interesting evolution. And AP views it as a way of freeing up their reporters to do bigger stories and more impactful stories. There is a certain rhythm to an earning story that it’s less a little bit less creative, a little bit less in depth. So they’re kind of shifting their resources towards, you know, allowing people to really dig into the bigger stories. So I think long, going forward, it’s the bigger stories, it’s the more impactful stories. It’s staying focused on that that I think, I think that’s the direction that business journalism is heading in. Things that are really helpful to people and in depth.
Remillard: I was just going to say it sounds a lot like what we’ve talked about the whole time is that business reporting isn’t just stocks and corporate earnings, there’s money in every angle, there’s always a money angle. Sounds a lot like what we’ve been preaching.
Quillen: Excellent point.
Maynard: Yeah, this is, this is definitely preaching to our choir. So you know, you’re an editor. So how do you think business journalism skills help people on other beats? Because you have been a business editor for a long time, but now you’re over a little bit more general area. So what do you see in the people who have some business background versus those that don’t?
Quillen: Yeah, I think comfort with covering money and following money, that’s something that business journalists learn, and it translates well into other beats, whether it’s covering a municipal budget or a big deal that the school board is about to sign. So learning how to follow the money and being comfortable writing about it is a skill that business journalists can take with them into other areas. The other thing that I’ve noticed about business coverage is that business beats, in general, I think require a little bit more shoe leather and a little bit more of an entrepreneurial mindset for the reporter, and I think that translates well. For example, most of the business beats that I’ve been associated with are not meeting-driven beats. They’re beats where you kind of have to go out and dig up stories and think about stories. I mean, you may have corporate earnings reports which guide your coverage, and maybe you’re covering an airport authority that meets, but a lot of business coverage doesn’t come out of meetings and events. So you really do have to think critically and analytically and be looking for stories. And I think developing that skill is something that you can take to another beat, a non-business beat, and kind of take off with it.
Maynard: I think one of the concerns that some people have about business journalism is that the business journalism pre-crash, so the Wall Street Journal business journalism, the Bloomberg business journalism, the CNBC type of business journalism, that that now is seeming farther and farther away versus where business journalism is headed forward.
Quillen: Right.
Maynard: So just like to get a couple of your thoughts on the future of this, this specialty.
Quillen: Yeah, I think business journalism is evolving. Actually, when I got into business journalism, I’m embarrassed to say, it was about 20 years ago that was probably during the heyday of business coverage and everyone was was launching business journals and communities, CNBC was was becoming popular. I remember watching the Nightly Business Report at night, and people were becoming very focused on, really what is today considered financial journalism. Financial journalism being the stock market and investing and very kind of central business coverage. Now, I think we’re seeing business journalism go in many new directions. You look at a website like bankrate.com, or CNN Money, there’s a lot of first personal finance coverage, which is kind of related to the stock market, but not directly. It’s really about how you manage your money and how you make decisions as a consumer. How you select a checking account or a bank to deal with. So I think business journalism is heading in new directions and really broadening. And I think it’s an exciting time for journalists, because you can get into business journalism and you don’t have to just cover the stock market. There are all these different avenues that you can go in, and there are lots of new forms of journalism to work in, like a business website. There’s some great, high quality business websites out there. There are some still some old, kind of standby, business news wires, Bloomberg News, great place to work. Then you can go the newspaper route. There are lots of different avenues that you can go in business journalism. And I think that’s an exciting time. It’s been a stressful transition for our industry, but I do think there are some opportunities emerging and some new lines and areas of coverage that are exciting.
Maynard: Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us today.
Quillen: Thanks. Thanks for having me. It’s been fun.
Remillard: Next time on how to cover money, we’ll hear from one of the best known business editors in public radio. We’ll talk with Marilyn Geewax of NPR, who recently took part in a Reynolds workshop in Chicago on covering regional stories.
Maynard: Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism. If you’re interested in tips and story ideas, sign up for our daily newsletter at businessjournalism.org. Each morning, we’ll send you a rundown of our Must Read Money stories. 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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