In the Season 2 finale of How to Cover Money, co-hosts Micki Maynard and Mark Remillard take a look back at some of the best tips they got from all of the amazing journalists that joined them this season. If you missed any episodes, feel free to circle back to any of our previous episodes and, of course, keeping thinking like a business reporter!
Transcript
[Intro Music]
Micki Maynard: How to Cover Money: Tips from Top Journalists.
Mark Remillard: Today on How to Cover Money: Some greatest hits from this last series.
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. Hello Mark!
Remillard: Hi Micki. I can’t believe it, but we’re wrapping up another season. It really seems like it’s going by far too fast, and for this episode, we decided to just present some of our favorite tips from journalists that we spoke with over the last season.
Maynard: We had some really, really blue chip journalists join us for this season, and I’m so pleased that they made the time to to talk to us for How to Cover Money. And one of our first guests this season was Michael Grabell of ProPublica. And Michael was one of the gold medal winners of the Barlett and Steele Awards for investigative business journalism, and he won for an incredible package on the dangers faced by temporary workers in the United States.
Michael Grabell: We have gotten additional files of really gruesome, horrible situations, the man being pulled into a hummus grinding machine, the man being buried alive in sugar. In cases where these weren’t just accidents that happened. These were, the sugar factory had removed the lid, had removed the safety device, 13 days before this man’s death.
Remillard: Which I feel like, if you came across something like that, as you’re doing this data and you’re compiling, if you came across something and saw that a man died 13 days after someone removed a safety device, I feel like that’d be such a smoking gun, you know, looking at this. But it’s got to be so difficult as you’re compiling all these datas. And they, he did a lot of work in California and Florida, partly because that’s almost 50% of the U.S. population right there to look at, so he could get a pretty good idea. But if you’re looking at all that, I mean, you’ve got stacks and stacks of data, or spreadsheet after spreadsheet probably of data on your computer. And so going after a project like this just got to be absolutely daunting. So we asked Michael to give us a few tips on some of the best ways to get into it. And here’s what he told us.
Grabell: So number one, you need to get the data. You need to see that the problem that you are, that you think exists, you need to find out what data exists that I can prove this in. Can I prove this is a growing trend? A trend that people don’t, maybe knew about but don’t realize the scale of. Number two, you need to get on the record victims. And the third step, I guess I gave is write early. Some of the first drafts of the stories that I wrote came the minute I got back from a reporting trip, I sat down and wrote down everything I saw. And that, I think, kept it with a sense of urgency that I wouldn’t have had if I had waited nine months later to remember what it felt like to be somewhere.
Maynard: You know, that tip about writing early runs counter to what a lot of us learned in our careers, that you don’t want to write early because you don’t want to give away what you’re doing. You know, you don’t want to leave breadcrumbs that somebody else could follow. But my sense is that the package that Michael wrote is just so complicated and so involved that, you know, maybe he could have written one story about a guy being buried in sugar, and every would one would have said, “Gosh, that’s terrible,” but they never would have known that this big situation with temporary workers was lurking out there.
Remillard: So from one amazing set of work by Michael where we really got a sense of how to handle large journalism projects, these major data and investigative style stories. Week two of the series gave us a completely different look at business journalism, and that’s one that we’ve talked about a lot, and that’s writing business for broadcast. We were joined by Ben Bergman of KPCC in Los Angeles, and he told us about how important it is to keep your writing clear and concise.
Maynard: 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. And what’s kind of interesting is 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.
Ben Bergman: Print writers, you read these leads in the New York Times, and they have so many clauses and that 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 Steven 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.
Remillard: 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 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 of, 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.
During Week Six of the series, we took some time to get an idea of what business writers can do to keep their editors happy. So to do this, we invited Kim Quillen of the Arizona Republic, she’s also formerly of the New Orleans Times Picayune, to come and give us her thoughts on what business writers should be doing and how to avoid some very common mistakes that can upset your editors.
Kim Quillen: To 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 in 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. 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 put tons of numbers in and readers just lose it then.
Remillard: That’s it for Season 2 of How to Cover Money. Catch up on any of the other episodes that you may have missed and let us know talk about next season.
Maynard: It’s been a real pleasure to bring you our podcast, and it’s been wonderful to work with you, Mark, thanks for sitting across the studio for me.
Remillard: Of course.
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, sign up for our daily newsletter. Each morning, we’ll send you a rundown of our Must Read Money Stories. You can use those to inspire your own pieces and to get a jump on the day. Visit our website businessjournalism.org. You’ll find a list of all our upcoming workshops, you can download our ebooks, and you can also find out how to enter the Barlett and Steele Awards that Michael Grabell and his team won this past year. They’re given out every fall for investigative business journalism, and it’s free to apply. For Mark Remillard, I’m Micki Maynard. Now, start thinking like a business reporter.
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