Beat Guide: Business Reporting

Thirty years ago, covering business might have been a backwater at many publications. Now it’s a mainstay of coverage with a surprisingly large share of Pulitzers and other leading awards. If you are joining your publication’s business reporting team, you are probably wondering where to begin. Here's a guide designed to help you find good stories, approach business coverage effectively, make sense of the jargon and avoid some common early missteps.

This guide draws on my experience in business journalism since 1978, most recently as a news editor at The Wall Street Journal. Newspaper beat assignments over the years have included covering financial markets, European business news and the high-tech sector. That’s meant working in bureaus ranging from New York to London and Silicon Valley. Magazine experience has included stints as a contributing editor for Smart Money magazine and as West Coast bureau chief for Fast Company magazine. I also have written three business books. They are: “Merchants of Debt,” which chronicled the leveraged buyout boom of the 1980s; “Health Against Wealth,” which scrutinized the managed care industry in the mid-1990s, and “Perfect Enough,” which examined four tempestuous years in the leadership of Hewlett-Packard. In 1997 I had the good fortune to be part of a team of Journal reporters that won the Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, based on coverage of new AIDS therapies.

This guide opens with general thoughts about business reporting. It then provides detailed pointers and resources (including Web links) for several areas of business coverage. A section on corporate reporting looks at the obvious – and unpredictable – ways that companies become newsworthy. A section on financial markets and economic coverage explains how to write about stocks, interest rates and personal finance, as well as broad issues such as jobs, inflation and economic growth in ways that will connect with your readers. Finally, the guide closes with our own brief glossary and pointers to bigger ones, as well as a variety of useful Web links to business-related sites.