Co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard talk with Marilyn Geewax, an editor at NPR. Geewax gives her thoughts on the importance of impact in stories and how news from all around the world and the nation can impact your local readers. Geewax gives advice to journalists on how to find their next story, what websites are goldmines of information, and how to interpret the data for your reader.
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money: How a national business editor views regional news.
Marilyn Geewax: The important thing for us to do is to make the issues clear and relevant for our audience. So you know, there are things that happen in other parts of the world, other parts of the country, that really have a big impact on people.
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 of the Reynolds Center, and with me is our co-host, Mark Remillard. He’s a Cronkite alum and a reporter and anchor at KTAR News. Hi Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki. Today we bring you Series 2, Episode 7 of How to Cover Money. It’s the second part of our two-part look at the editors point of view. And Micki, this episode features a workshop that the Reynolds Center held this spring in Chicago.
Maynard: That’s right, we put together a workshop on how to cover story ideas across your region. This is really important for people who might be pitching stories to national news organizations like NPR or one of the big newspapers like The New York Times, you can’t just focus on your city, you have to be able to say what’s going on across the Great Lakes or the south or the southwest.
Remillard: Our guest for this episode is Marilyn Geewax, who’s in charge of assigning business stories at NPR, both for the radio and for web. Marilyn is a native of Cleveland, which is where her brother still lives, and that gives her an interesting perspective when she looks at national news stories.
Geewax: The important thing for us to do is to make the issues clear and relevant for our audience. So, you know, there are things that happen in other parts of the world, other parts of the country, that really have a big impact on people, and those can be things like currency fluctuations, which sounds like the most boring topic in the world, until you’re like my brother, who’s a machinist outside of Cleveland. His company makes equipment that is used, he’s a machinist who makes hoists, things that lift up heavy things for drilling platforms and places where you have to lift up step heavy stuff. Well, when the dollar is too strong and his company is trying to sell hoists to a company doing business offshore in Africa. They can buy those hoists from a German maker, or they can buy them from a guy in Cleveland. So if the dollar is strong, it may make it more likely that they’re going to buy the stuff from Germany. So a currency fluctuation story sounds incredibly boring until you think about how does it affect the guy who works with a lathe standing on a machine shop floor trying to figure out if he’s going to get Saturday overtime or not. I mean, these stories have real impacts on people’s lives. It’s our job to figure out, how does that currency fluctuation have an impact on, you know, the local economy in your region?
Maynard: Marilyn talked to our audience a lot about how they can get up to speed on these really complicated topics, and there are a couple of pieces to that.
Geewax: There is no substitute for being well informed. You need to, like, go to classes, come to things like this. It is great that you’re here. Meet with economists, take people out for coffee. And actually, I mean, Twitter is good. You know, if you have the right people that you’re following, they’ll really steer you to some of the most interesting trends and events. So do make sure that you’re constantly informing yourself.
Remillard: Obviously, information is good, and she mentioned Twitter there, but when you get on Twitter, if you especially become active in it, you can start to follow quite a number of people. And I know I follow a few thousand, so there’s a lot of information coming your way. And Marilyn told us that it’s important for journalists to be selective, though.
Geewax: Step two is to filter and interpret what you see by doing what we are supposed to do best, which is just plain and simple thinking. I mean, when you see data, it’s all interesting but until we stop and take five minutes to think about it, we’re not we’re not really adding any value.
Maynard: This is a big problem for reporters now, because we’re expected to jump on a story and interpret it in a few seconds, and this is something that drives me crazy, because I’ll see people tweet and they tweet the news headline, and I’ve gotten the news headline from 14 different people, and what I really need is some interpretation of what that means. And this is what Marilyn had to say about that.
Geewax: We’re under so much pressure now to be quick all the time. Be fast, fast, fast. That you know, when you’re trying to do news in a minute, you often don’t take the time to think. And you know, I just want to remind us that basically, that is our value added. That we add the element of interpreting, understanding, being well-informed, looking for patterns, finding ways to connect data to people’s lives. So you know, amid all the pressure to turn things quickly and to tweet quickly and to post something or jump on the air and say something quickly, make sure that you know your time has, you set out time to turn interesting ideas into something that actually fits people’s lives.
Remillard: Coming from a broadcast perspective, I can tell you how important it is to boil things down. Especially in broadcast, people are driving, people are doing other things. We’ve talked about that before, like you need to be able to reach them at a level where understand it quickly and succinctly while they’re maybe doing other things. And a lot of times with business journalism, it can be really theoretical. And our listeners, and you know, very few people are theoretical in that way. They’re looking for real world application.
Geewax: You don’t sit around and think about, hmm, I wonder about currency fluctuations. What you do think about is, I wonder if I’ll have overtime on Saturday or not. Am I going to have enough work to keep me busy enough that I’m going to, you know, have some extra money at the end of the month? That’s how people think, because they are real people, and they live in specific and real places. And that’s what local and regional reporters are supposed to do, is take these interesting global trends, grow global data, and turn it into something useful.
Maynard: And I guess the big question is, where do you find interesting trends and interesting data? And we spent quite a while at the workshop talking about our favorite websites for that. And Marilyn had some really strong opinions on the ones that are her favorites. And I actually agree with her, some of them are my favorites too.
Geewax: You actually like going to census.gov, and you find yourself, after 20 minutes, thinking of three great stories that you’d like to do about how your region is changing, how what’s happening to your economy. Then you should be a journalist. So you know, test your own curiosity on these things, like just as your own personal test.
Remillard: So I think it’s interesting that she mentioned the USDA website. Some of the best business trend stories that I’ve done here at KTAR and in Phoenix have been agriculture stories. They’re so many forces play upon agriculture and crops, and it’s really easy to spot a trend. I did this story about plastic bags and how they affect the cotton industry, because they blow into fields and then they get picked up, and that can into the machinery, and that can actually destroy an entire bale of cotton, and that’s thousands of dollars, and that’s a pretty big industry here in Arizona. So agriculture is actually a really great way to find trends, and websites like the USDA is another great way to do that.
Mayanrd: Right. And she mentioned the Census website. My gosh, you can spend hours on the Census website. And especially when you look at their their household survey data, because that tells you not just so and so live where, but you can actually go back into the census data for decades and find out who lived in your house in 1920, if your house existed in 1920. The other thing that I really like is the Bureau of Transportation Statistics website, which you can drill into and find statistics on every airport and every airline. And you can even find which flights are late the most often. And everybody’s got an airport, so that’s just a gold mine for you know, people, if you’re starting to hear from listeners or readers saying, “Why is my flight to Denver delayed all the time?” You can go in and look at, you know, Phoenix to Denver, and how often is it delayed. So I think these big websites are just something you have to have if you’re going to be a journalist.
Remillard: I love when government sites actually really do a great job of putting up their data. It’s awesome when they have that. Next time, we’ll look at one of the most popular topics at the Reynolds workshop in Chicago, the money and sports rivalries.
Maynard: Support for How to Cover Money comes from the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism Visit our website, businessjournalism.org. You can sign up for our daily newsletter, Must Read Money Stories, which will give you story ideas that you can cover wherever you are. You also can see a calendar of all of our upcoming workshops, like the one we just held in Chicago and the ones that we’ll have over the summer. And you can find information on how to enter the Barlett and Steele Awards for investigative business journalism. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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