CNBC reporter Kayla Tausche says her most effective tool in reporting about Wall Street is to text her major sources.
“Email is great, but many times people don’t want to leave a paper trail,” said Tausche in a talk Monday morning. “Texting has been the single-most important thing to my reporting.”
Tausche spoke Monday at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication. She is a 2008 graduate of the School, where she studied business journalism. She worked at a mergers and acquisitions newsletter run by The Financial Times before joining CNBC in 2011.
Tausche said she also sends between 30 and 40 emails to traders daily to ask them what stocks they are looking at. She also said that she once called a source 20 times before he agreed to talk to her off the record.
“I’m doing exactly what I want to do,” said Tausche. “I have my dream job.”
Tausche also told the audience of about 60 that her role models are CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo, CNN anchor Erin Burnett and Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan.
“Maria Bartiromo is the major name in the business,” said Tausche. “Anyone would do well to have a piece of what she has accomplished.”
She called business journalism “still, at the end of the day, a human story,” and also said that a Goldman Sachs executive gave an interview to Bloomberg Television are promising Tausche that his interview with her was exclusive.
“They didn’t love where our interview was going,” noted Tausche, adding that the interview was about veterans working on Wall Street, but that she also asked questions about the economy and Goldman Sachs’s business. “Things like that happen. People are not always going to be nice to you.”
