Show Me the Money

Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication

Chris Roush

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317282815
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Show Me the Money is the definitive business journalism textbook that offers hands-on advice and insights into the job of a business journalist. Chris Roush draws on his experience as both a business journalist and educator to explain how to cover businesses, industry and the economy, as well as where to find sources of information for stories and how to take financial information and make it work for a story.

Updates to the third edition include:

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• Inclusion of timely issues related to real estate;

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• Additional examples from websites and other nontraditional business media such as BuzzFeed and Quartz;

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• Tips from professional business journalists including Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times and Jennifer Forsyth of The Wall Street Journal.

Essential for both undergraduate and graduate courses in business journalism and professional business journalism newsrooms, Show Me the Money is a must-read for reporters, editors and students who want to learn the ins and outs of how to cover public and private companies. Additional materieals, including a sample syllabus and additional links and tips for students can be found at https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138188389

1

Business Journalism’s Importance

If you want to understand why business journalism is so important, just look at the money being spent in the past decade to acquire or build news organizations that provide business and economic information.

In 2007, News Corp. spent $5 billion to acquire the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, MarketWatch.com and Barron’s. Shortly thereafter, Thomson Corp. bought Reuters, primarily a financial news wire, for $17 billion.

Condé Nast, one of the largest magazine companies in the United States, spent $100 million to start a business magazine called Portfolio. Bloomberg acquired BusinessWeek magazine to expand its portfolio of business news products to a consumer audience. The company also spent millions expanding its news operation to include coverage of regulatory and government news that affect businesses.

More recently, Axel Springer, a German company, spent more than $340 million in 2015 to acquire a majority stake in Business Insider, the second-largest business news website in the United States. And in the same year, Japanese company Nikkei spent $1.3 billion to acquire the Financial Times, the second-largest business newspaper behind the Wall Street Journal.

Billions of dollars have been spent on acquiring business journalism organizations for one simple reason—it’s the one news area that consumers can use to make money. And that makes it very valuable all over the world.

It’s also why business journalism is gaining in prominence in the media world, and why journalists—whether they’re interested in business and economics stories or not—would be wise to know something about how such stories are reported and written.

Business reporting is just like reporting any other beat. You have to know what you are writing about, which documents to look for and which sources to use. Even though the quality of business journalism has improved in the past 15 years, there are still concerns that reporters in the field are not fully knowledgeable about their topics.

Also, some business reporters and editors do not know the appropriate place to look for the information they need to get the story or to make the story they already have even better. Still others do not understand the basic principles of economics that help a company’s profits rise and fall, and even more do not understand the importance of the stock market and trade relations to a business’s future prospects.

Those that do understand how to find information about companies and the economy have a leg up on other journalists.

Business journalism is also almost every story in journalism. Government stories are about who is getting contracts to repair roads and build schools. Crime stories can be about why someone embezzled millions of dollars from a company. Health stories are about the escalating cost of taking care of the sick or injured, and what company is developing a new drug to treat cancer. Environmental stories are about how businesses are changing their operations to decrease their pollution into the air. And gender stories are about how some companies don’t pay women as much as they pay men for the same job.

The skills of a business journalist pay off on these other beats. Knowing how to read an income statement and a contract, or a regulatory document, for news is a skill every journalist should know, whether they are covering a business and economic beat are not.

Tips from the Pros

Quartz reporter Melvin Backman advises newcomers to business journalism:

Read a lot. The half-life of a story idea has gotten dramatically shorter these past few years. You need to stay abreast of all the angles that are getting tackled when news breaks so that you can keep your writing original and serve the readers by showing them something they haven’t already seen (or a new way to see it).

In other words, all journalism boils down to one statement: Show me the money. Show the reader or viewer or listener where the money is coming from, or where it is going, and you have a great story. And that is the essence of business journalism.

There’s also more money involved for those who work in business journalism. A 2015 study by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers (SABEW) and the Talking Biz News website discovered that business journalists received a salary between $70,000 and $75,000 and that a majority of those surveyed had received a raise in the past year.¹

In comparison, the mean salary for all reporters and correspondents in the United States is $45,800, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.²

And there’s yet another strong reason to consider a career in business journalism: The jobs are plentiful. News organizations such as Bloomberg, Reuters, the Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, American City Business Journals, Crain Communications and others are constantly looking for business reporters and editors to work for them. Unlike other areas of journalism, their publications continue to grow in circulation and advertising, which means that they can hire more journalists.

Why is this happening? The reason goes back to why all of those companies are spending billions of dollars to own business news organizations. The readers of business and economics news are willing to pay for that information because it helps them make decisions on how to spend money, whether for personal reasons or for their companies. And these readers typically make more money than the consumers of other media, which means these companies can charge more for advertising than other media.

In the first part of the twenty-first century, the number of business journalism news outlets has proliferated, particularly online. Many of them only cover a specific industry, or a specific type of company. Others try to present business and economic news and information in a way that hasn’t been done before. Still others are trying to cater to new demographics.

They’re all responding to the decline in business news and information in daily newspapers across the country, where many consumers got their fill of company news each day. Many metro dailies cut back on their business sections when they stopped printing daily stock prices, and then they cut their staffs during the economic recession in 2008 and 2009.

Tips from the Pros

Quartz reporter Melvin Backman advises newcomers to business journalism:

Ask where the chart is. You don’t necessarily need to actually make a chart for every story you do, but it’s always helpful to think about the numbers that might be behind it. How fast has this company grown? What kind of year is this asset class having? That kind of context can be key to help you establish a narrative or disprove one if need be.

For example, Business Insider was launched in 2009 by former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget. By 2015, it had become the No. 2 business and financial website in the country, behind only Yahoo Finance, and had seen a 70 percent increase in readers in the previous year. The site also contained entertainment and sports news, but it targeted younger readers. It expanded to Europe and Australia and introduced a consumer tech site. Sixty percent of its readers used mobile devices.

Another site, 24/7 Wall St., was launched in 2006 by the former Financial World editor. Its content was also republished on other websites such as MSN Money, Yahoo Finance, AOL’s Daily Finance, MarketWatch.com and the Huffington Post. It posted 30 articles daily, and its profit margin was higher than 50 percent, showing that an advertising-based business model can work for business news sites with strong editorial content.

Quartz, another business news website, was launched by the Atlantic in 2012 and is now breaking news. It launched sites in India and Africa, and it’s primarily funded by advertising revenue and sponsors. In a unique move, Quartz has reporters and computer developers sitting beside each other in its offices.

The Information is a tech news site launched in 2013 by former Wall Street Journal reporter Jessica Lessin. A subscription to the site costs $400 per year, and Lessin had built a full-time staff of 15 by the end of 2015, covering what it believes are underreported stories.

NerdWallet.com launched in 2010 and is a personal finance site used by 30 million people in 2014. It combines personal finance articles with data about financial products such as credit cards and mortgages, helping its readers make the best financial decisions. Its funky name also helps attract readers.

American City Business Journals, which operates 40 weekly business newspapers across the country, launched BizWomen.com in 2014. The site provides news for women business leaders and gathers content from its other papers onto the site as well as creating original content.

Then there’s my former student Aaron Kremer, who in the past decade has launched RichmondBizSense.com in Virginia and the BusinessDen.com in Colorado to provide business news to readers in those areas.

These examples, and many others like them, show that business journalism is not only alive and well, but growing. And it shows that the field needs more trained business reporters and editors.

Top 10 Business Journalism Stories of All Time

1. Ida Tarbell’s coverage of the Standard Oil Co. in McClure’s.
2. Upton Sinclair exposing the meatpacking industry in The Jungle.
3. Rachel Carson’s exposé of the chemical industry in Silent Spring.
4. Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed,” which disclosed dangers of the Corvair.
5. John Spargo’s reporting on coal mines using children as workers.
6. Edward R. Murrow’s “Harvest of Shame,” exposing working conditions of migrants.
7. Jessica Mitford’s “American Way of Death,” uncovering funeral industry abuses.
8. Houston station KHOU-TV reporting on problems with Firestone tires on Ford Explorer vehicles.
9. Barlett and Steele explaining how federal tax laws are applied unequally.
10. Collier’s magazine’s 1905 exposé of the patent medicine industry.

The History of Business Journalism

Business journalism has had a profound effect on the United States and the millions of people who interact with companies on an everyday basis by purchasing their goods, products and services.

Early settlers in America depended on newspapers to provide them with details of crop and livestock prices and information about which ships had entered the port and the goods they contained. By the nineteenth century, newspapers devoted solely to business news were established. The Journal of Commerce began in 1827. The Wall Street Journal came along in 1889. But some of the most important stories in business journalism during this time ran in mainstream papers.

Tips from the Pros

Quartz reporter Melvin Backman advises newcomers to business journalism:

Look for diverse experts. Business journalism, like most subject areas, isn’t very diverse along race or gender lines. Reach out to women and minorities in order to build a more sophisticated worldview and bring underrepresented perspectives to your readership that can really enrich coverage.

In the late 1850s, Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune pushed for a railroad that would connect the East and the West. His stories were the first major push to combine the regional economies of a growing country. Greeley also wrote about the need for low-cost homestead lands, another important development in the U.S. economy. A decade later, the New York Sun exposed how the construction company that helped build the first intercontinental railroad had been formed by the railroad companies themselves, which were essentially making contracts with one another and bri...