Journalists intent on leveling up their game in the new year should focus on meeting audiences where they are, upskilling in artificial intelligence and planning their careers strategically, according to panelists at a recent webinar hosted by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing (SABEW).
Two of the featured journalists, Laura Sanicola and Phil Rosen, left established news organizations to start newsletters, while the third, Sara Salinas, has spent more than eight years at CNBC and leads a team of editors and reporters there as a senior business editor. Chris Roush, Elon University’s assistant vice president of strategic partnerships, moderated the discussion.
“Super serving” the audience through newsletters
Salinas helps edit four newsletters a week as a way to “super serve an audience” by tailoring CNBC content to different styles of consumption that wins audience loyalty.
“A lot of our subscriber content is now distributed through newsletters. They are designed and tailored to speak to the specific audiences and kind of meet them where they are to just create a really well-rounded and bespoke product for what are increasingly specified audiences that are subsets of the larger CNBC audience,” Salinas said.
She added that newsletters are “habit-forming” and help readers know what to expect.
“If you open a CNBC Property Play newsletter, you know you’re going to get commercial real estate investment analysis, some data, a chart of the week,” Salinas said. “It’s frankly a little soothing in a world in which news can be chaotic, to say the least, and so to know what you’re going to get, to know where you’re going to get it, just keeps a really engaged, really loyal audience.”
The tone of newsletters is also distinct from that of traditional news reports.
Sanicola went from writing stories for Reuters to authoring Barron’s Energy Insider newsletter and had to master a new way of presenting information, since Barron’s subscribers look for a different tone than people who read newswires.
“They don’t necessarily want your very strong opinion to override the news, but they want you to kind of navigate them towards a really complex sector, whether it’s technology, business, investing, a combination of those things,” Sanicola said. “I’ve worked very closely with my editors to kind of try and develop that voice that resonates with readers and allows me also to be creative and flexible.”
This trend of readers turning to unique voices for news inspired Phil Rosen, a former Business Insider reporter, to co-found the financial newsletter Opening Bell Daily.
“Companies are pushing towards following individuals because they know readers want to follow individuals instead of sort of faceless institutions,” Rosen said.
Learning on the job and advice on landing dream roles
Covering the energy beat at Reuters was a “trial by fire” for Sanicola when she first started in 2019.
“Sometimes trial by fire is the best way to learn a lot about an industry, because you just have no choice but to learn as quickly as humanly possible from as many people as you can and your colleagues and data,” she said.
When an opportunity to write her own energy newsletter at Barron’s surfaced, Sanicola decided to take a leap of faith and now advises other journalists to keep an open mind.
“There’s always going to be an opportunity for you to position yourself the way you want to be positioned, and just don’t write anything off,” she said.
Rosen emphasized that “volume of work” is what can make journalists come across as more experienced by developing news judgment, even if they’re younger than their competitors working at the same job.
“I don’t know if there’s anything I’ve done that’s unique or something that other people couldn’t do, so I think if you just write more than the people in your newsroom, or that you’re competing with, or that you’re working with, odds are your writing will reflect that,” Rosen said. “It’s like shooting free throws in basketball: If you just practice more, your percentages will go up.”
When Salinas is hiring a reporter, she looks for the deeper reasons why applicants do what they do, since by the time their applications arrive at her door, recruiters or other hiring agents have already vetted their writing and reporting skills.
“I look for ‘what is the motivation for why you write cleanly?’ That sounds silly to think about, but really the answer should be because you want to make a complex subject really digestible, and you want to make it approachable,” she said. “You can spot that in someone regardless of their experience. I’ve hired some incredibly sharp, incredibly nuanced and mature postgrad applicants fresh out of college.”
To stand out from other applicants, Sanicola demonstrated to Barron’s that she could write for a diverse audience of clients for Reuters, while Rosen impressed Business Insider with the travel blog he wrote in college.
He said the people he knows who have landed their dream jobs often did so by demonstrating their side projects to employers.
“I think that there are no coincidences,” Rosen said.
Skills not related directly to journalism can also help, whether it’s merely to signal agility and initiative or as a direct assist to the newsroom.
“If I were hiring for a reporter and they have coding skills, the odds that I utilize their coding skills if I hire them as a reporter are very, very slim, but what it tells me is they have a broad understanding of what is possible on the internet and maybe should we develop a project on the line where we can get a little more creative, or we want to adjust something about our website, maybe I bring them into that conversation,” Salinas said.
Sanicola advised mastering the fundamentals of journalism: building source relationships and learning how to ask questions and talk to people.
Artificial intelligence increasingly embedded in workflows
Sanicola uses AI to locate and scrape data from the Internet, saving valuable time while on deadline instead of frantically searching for what she needs on Google.
“That is really useful when you are working in a time crunch,” she said. “Looking for data and finding the right data source is a huge part of being a journalist.”
Salinas and her team are using AI to workshop headlines, asking for feedback on buzzwords and for new ways to capture “the drama” of the story.
Rosen encouraged reporters to get comfortable with using artificial intelligence to “build awesome things” to show to employers. Rosen warned that young journalists will get left behind if they don’t start mastering AI tools.
“You, as the young person, must be the best person at AI in your newsroom because a lot of the older folks will be turning to you to teach everyone else how to use these tools,” he said. “That’ll be the defining skill of the next five years.”
