Tag Archives: Writing tips
Long stories replaced by shorter ones at WSJ
by Chris Roush
Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review has quantified the decrease in the number of longer stories published in the Wall Street Journal since it was acquired by News Corp.
Chittum writes, “The Wall Street Journal’s page one has long been the standard-bearer for business writing and reporting, at least for newspapers. It took news and turned it into narrative nonfiction, everyday, twice a day, for decades. But Rupert Murdoch made it no secret that he disdained the Journal’s page-one tradition of long-form journalism, and it’s been de-emphasized under his ownership. That’s our qualitative impression, anyway, based on reading the paper, following the tealeaves, and talking to former colleagues.
“I wondered if you could quantify it, though, so I turned to Journal corporate cousin Factiva to put together these charts showing the drop-off in long-form reporting on page one of the paper.
“Here’s the number of A1 stories longer than 1,500 words in the last decade (note that I annualized all the 2011 numbers in this post since we’ve still got eleven-plus weeks left this year):
“Murdoch took over at the end of 2007, defenestrated Marcus Brauchli four months later, and these stories have plunged a stunning 70 percent in the Murdoch era.”
Read more here.
Be more careful with the “no nonsense” phrase
by Chris Roush
Mike Hoban of Fast Company magazine wants business journalists to be more careful in using the “no nonsense” phrase to describe managers and executives.
Hoban writes, “Business writers are fond of using that expression as a compliment of sorts, but it’s unclear what it means. Does it mean a manager–male or female–who wears No Nonsense hose? I don’t think so, although if it does mean that, it puts a different twist on all those manager profile stories I’ve read that use that term. With Boss’s Day just around the corner, let’s explore just what this phrase means so we can have some context if we encounter it in countless blogs and articles leading up to October 16.
“What comes to mind for you when you read that Mr. or Ms. Smith is a ‘no nonsense’ manager? What images do those words conjure? I get a picture of someone who is humorless. Dour. Unforgiving. Not very approachable. Someone who would never tolerate anything called ‘team building.’ Someone ‘by the book’ to a fault. Someone who reminds you of the strict teacher from high school who generated universal enmity.
“However, in practice ‘no nonsense’ doesn’t seem to mean that. I think. For instance, the bank CEO profile featured earlier this week in the business section of one of America’s largest dailies extolled the executive as a ‘no nonsense’ manager, yet also described him as ‘jocular.’ Wouldn’t jocularity qualify as ‘nonsense?’ This CEO is described among other things as being blunt, focused, and disciplined, but having read the piece several times, I’m still not sure why those qualities make him ‘no nonsense.’
“I’m not picking on that writer — I’ve seen it and read it many times over the years in the business press. Holding people accountable makes a manager ‘no nonsense?’ Making tough choices makes a manager ‘no nonsense?’ That’s what they’re supposed to do! I do a fair amount of executive coaching and work with 360-degree feedback tools and have never heard anyone ever use that term to describe themselves or anyone else. Nor have I ever seen it on a performance review. The label might be a journalistic convenience to create a sage-like sound bite but in my book is more likely to be a nonsequitur.”
Read more here.
It’s good to be Michael Lewis
by Chris Roush
Jessica Pressler of New York magazine profiles business journalist Michael Lewis, the author of “The Big Short” and a Bloomberg News columnist.
Pressler writes, “Lewis is often referred to as a business writer, and this is sort of true, in that his narratives usually focus on some kind of market, be it for bonds or baseball players. But he’s a business writer only in the same way that Malcolm Gladwell is a business writer. What most interests him are people and how they behave. He tends to favor stories about mavericks — like the Tuohys, Beane, Whitney, and Steve Eisman, the eccentric short-seller star of The Big Short — smart people who identify gaps of logic and market inefficiencies, and take advantage of them.
“He can write about these kinds of people with such skill in part because he is one of them. At a time of peril for his industry, Lewis has managed to build what amounts to a personal empire of long-form journalism, with a Warren Buffett-like collection of brands and eye for the next big thing. ‘He’s got good instincts for the individual story and for the broader picture of where that story belongs,’ says Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. ‘The big story of the day is the world financial crisis, and he’s the most kick-ass business writer out there.’
“His aptitude for translating and enlivening financial concepts has made him an indispensable observer of the crisis: In May 2010, Politico reported that The Big Short had been name-checked on the official Senate record at least fifteen times since its publication just two months before, and that Hill staffers had been calling Lewis at home for advice. ‘I was watching television the other day, and Barney Frank was quoting him like he was a Nobel laureate,’ Whitney tells me. This spring, Lewis was invited to Washington to speak to the Democratic Caucus. Afterward, senators came up to him, fanlike, asking for autographs. ‘I have to believe that’s how a lot of those senators learned about the crisis,’ says Whitney.
“This week, he’ll publish a follow-up, Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World, a collection of hilarious reported essays he wrote for Vanity Fair that finger Icelandic elves, greedy Greek monks, and a German obsession with shit as a few of the culprits for the European economic collapse. With the continent in an economic meltdown nobody seems to really understand, these witty ethnographic studies have been received like Rosetta stones. It will be no surprise if senators are soon consulting them, too.”
Read more here.
What Forbes taught a biz journalist
by Chris Roush
Leigh Gallagher, an assistant managing editor at Fortune, writes about her time at rival Forbes from 1998 to 2004 in the wake of the publication of former managing editor Stewart Pinkerton‘s book “The Fall of the House of Forbes.”
Gallagher writes, “Pinkerton, who left in 2009 under, well, not-so-happy circumstances, also delivers one of the best characters in all of journalism in Jim Michaels, the ferociously talented editor who ran the magazine from 1961 to 1999. While I was there, Michaels was a much-feared overlord who was seen and heard mainly through his scathing all-caps comments on stories, viewable for all to see in the company’s editing system. (Among them: ‘I DON’T CARE WHAT THE ANALYST THINKS. WHAT DO YOU THINK??;’ ‘I ASSUME YOU UNDERSTAND THIS BECAUSE YOUR INITIALS ARE ON IT. I DON’T. FIX IT. JWM;’ and ‘THIS ISN’T REPORTING. THIS IS STENOGRAPHY. WHY IS THIS PERSON STILL ON STAFF???’). As Pinkerton recounts, Michaels would rewrite stories at the eleventh hour or kill them entirely; he kicked writers who quit out of the building; tortured his lieutenants; and ran such stressful story pitch meetings that writers were known to throw up before them.
“But he was also a brilliant editor — it was said he could edit the Bible down to six words — who left his imprint on some of journalism’s biggest names. ‘My column today consists of techniques I learned from Michaels,’ Fortune columnist and seven-time Loeb Award winner Allan Sloan told me recently. ‘I cannot tell you the influence he had on my career.’ (Read Allan Sloan’s 2007 tribute to Michaels here.) Pinkerton delves deeply into Michaels’ biographical and family history, which will be new material even to most Forbes veterans.
“The book ticks through the various eras of modern-day Forbes, from the birth of the Forbes 400, the magazine’s annual ranking of the richest people in America, through battles over who would succeed Michaels. (When Bill Baldwin ushered in a gentler management style, Pinkerton writes, the ‘collective Zoloft … bill for the edit staff almost certainly plummeted to a postwar low.’) These sections are dotted with anecdotes of the Forbes culture I knew well: late nights and idiosyncratic personalities, boozy lunches at Gotham Bar and Grill (which Pinkerton admits to keeping in business), screaming matches between Dennis Kneale, the new managing editor who’d blown in from the Wall Street Journal, and a then-retired Michaels; early fumbles with ‘digital convergence,’ including the ill-fated CueCat experiment where subscribers were mailed a plastic barcode scanner to access advertiser content online.”
Read more here.
A day in the life of a business journalist
by Chris Roush
Joris Luyendijk of The Guardian in London has a humorous first-person account of an anonymous financial journalist in Britain that sounds eerily similar to what an American business journalist does each day.
In part, it reads:
“A working day in the life of this financial journalist? Well, actually, that can be quite boring I’m afraid. Every morning at 9.30am loads of data about the UK economy is released. Unemployment figures, GDP for this quarter, consumer confidence indexes, the sort of stuff that analysts and economists use to determine how the economy and individual companies are doing. My job is to condense that data into a short article, telling readers what is happening in the economy and why. As I am doing this, banks and analysts publish so-called ‘notes’ with their interpretation of the figures, whether they are reason for optimism or pessimism, higher or lower than expected. You may say they speculate how the markets will react to these figures. I am going through these notes, and I call round my own contacts, economists in the City whose judgment I have come to value.
“These ‘notes’ are a curious thing. Banks and analysts write them for their clients, but they also write them for us journalists. If we quote a particular analyst it makes him, his ideas and his organisation look really good.
“Investors are known to approach analysts on the basis of their being quoted in our pages – it’s free publicity of the best kind. For me the notes are useful as a first take on how the figures of that day are received, and also for colour. If you write an article it helps the flow if can you stick in a quote or two. Of course, analysts know this, so there is this game going on. On the one hand the analysts don’t want to say controversial things that turn out to be wrong and make them look like fools. Yet they need to say things that stand out if they want to have a chance at getting quoted.
“I like writing longer articles. Say unemployment figures show that the crisis has hit low-educated, white males hardest. Then I try to go to the place in the UK where the effects are felt the most. I talk to people, then use their quotes to ‘head’ and ‘tail’ the piece. I open with descriptions of the people and their lives for ‘colour’, as we call it. The statistics and analysis go in the middle, and at the end I return to the scene I opened with, for a final quote.”
Read more here.
Business media overuses Moody’s Zandi
by Chris Roush
Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review writes Friday that business journalists call on Moody’s economist Mark Zandi too much and need to broaden their source lists.
Chittum writes, “Who’s Mark Zandi? He’s the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, a Keynesian McCain adviser back in 2008 who supports the Obama stimulus, and a quote machine for deadline-frazzled journalists everywhere.
“I brought up Factiva and searched major news and business publications in the U.S., to get an idea of just how much Zandi appears in the press. So far this year, he’s appeared 446 times to date, roughly 1.8 times a day. In the last week alone, he shows up about twenty-five times in USA Today (twice), Reuters, the Washington Post, the Financial Times, the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal (twice), Marketwatch, Dow Jones Newswires, Agence France Presse.”
Later, Chittum notes, “If Zandi isn’t the Most Interviewed Man in the Business Press by a wide margin, he’s up there in the top two or three. I get roughly seventy Zandi hits on Bloomberg’s site so far this year. On Factiva, he shows up sixty-seven times in the AP, thirty-three times in the Post, thirty-two times in USA Today, and twenty-six times in The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal is relatively Zandi-deprived, with just fifteen mentions.”
Read more here.
How business reporting helps one understand numbers and markets
by Chris Roush
Editor Britta Waller of Pace Communications, which produces magazines for companies such as Southwest Airlines and US Airways, writes about how she became facile with understanding markets and numbers.
Waller writes, “Most of the editors I know joke about their lack of skill with understanding numbers or even doing simple arithmetic without a calculator. ‘We’re word people’ is a typical comment.
“But I’ve tried not to be intimidated by writing or editing content that has to do with numbers, money, business or investment. In fact, the majority of the content I handle at Pace Communications falls into these categories.
“My dad asked me where I had gained my ‘above-average level of investment knowledge.’
“I had to think about that one. I decided that microeconomics in college was a good start for the basics — supply-and-demand charts, limiting and non-limiting factors, gross versus net.
“Working as a business reporter was the next good step. I remember the day that I learned what a bucket shop was and had the pleasure of teaching my editor. (In case you don’t know, it’s a Wall Street firm that doesn’t have the financial security to see through the initial public offerings it tries to launch. Both the company owners and the investors are left in the lurch, and sometimes the firm partners end up prosecuted.)
“Years of fact-checking business and investment stories also helped a lot. And following the coverage of scandals like Tyco and World Com, I gained new knowledge mixed in with my shock and outrage. I even read a few personal finance books along the way, some of which I’ll discuss later.”
Read more here.
Marketplace explains in a way that people can understand
by Chris Roush
Lucas Shaw of The Wrap interviewed Deborah Clark, the new executive producer of “Marketplace,” the business show on public radio.
Here is an excerpt:
What is the first order of business as the new head of editorial?
We have a great opportunity right now. What’s been happening in recent weeks in particular with lots of market turmoil is it means people are focused again on the economy and the direction this country is headed in terms of its growth, economic health and its place in the world. Our job is to take that and go with it.
What “Marketplace” has always been good at is explaining it all in a way that people who aren’t business types can understand. That doesn’t mean dumbing it down but taking complicated issues and making them understandable.
Has anything surprised you in the media’s coverage of all this economic turmoil?
I was at a dinner party on the day the debt ceiling deal finally happened, and it’s so interesting because it was just a group of regular people — we all have kids the same age and we were swimming, hanging out on a nice L.A. afternoon — and they wanted to know from me what was happening with the debt. Talking it through, I was surprised at their level of knowledge.
Read more here.
The reporting and writing style of Michael Lewis
by Chris Roush
In the wake of a story in Vanity Fair by financial journalist Michal Lewis that he argues misses the mark, Felix Salmon of Reuters examines Lewis’s writing and reporting techniques.
Salmon writes, “Lewis is the best writer in financial journalism by some large margin, and much of what he does when reporting and writing his stories is simply unique. His technique is a labor-intensive one: Lewis talks to an enormous number of people, works out what story he wants to tell, and then puts together various tales and individuals he’s discovered over the course of his reporting in the service of telling that story in the most entertaining and compellingly readable way. It doesn’t matter how important you are, or whether you’ve given Lewis an important nugget of unreported news: if it doesn’t help the structure of his story, he’ll happily leave it out.
“There are other financial journalists who are excellent writers, albeit not very many of them. Matt Taibbi and the NYT’s David Segal spring to mind. But none of them are willing to subsume news in service of the story to the degree that Lewis is.
“This is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. In fact, in many ways it’s admirable. Lewis is an expository journalist by nature, and a master storyteller; he’s not a muckraker or news-breaker. We have far too few storytellers in financial journalism, while there are literally thousands of journalists looking to break incremental pieces of news. It’s clear where Lewis’s value lies — he can explain what’s going on to a broad audience of Vanity Fair readers, and doing so in a way that they love to read. No one else could make them care about Greece’s role in the European financial crisis; Lewis’s article on the country is a veritable master class on how to take a dry and recondite subject and make it thoroughly entertaining.
“But Lewis’s incredible facility at storytelling is a powerful tool, and we have to be able to trust the craftsman who wields it. Lewis’s stories tend to be far more deeply reported than they seem at first glance, and in order for us to trust that he stands on the side of the angels we have to be able to trust in his judgment about what exactly the real story is. Because his raw material is extensive enough to support just about any thesis he wants.”
Read more here.
Shorter stories in WSJ means nothing to readers
by Chris Roush
Felix Salmon of Reuters argues Tuesday that the research from Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review showing that the Wall Street Journal is producing fewer longer stories doesn’t mean much in today’s journalism world.
“I read long business and finance stories for a living — that’s my job — and I don’t read six per day, let alone six per day from a single publication. The job of the WSJ is not to overload its readers with many hours’ worth of reading every day. And the current pace, of roughly one long-form front-page story per day, seems much more reasonable to me. (Most readers, of course, won’t even read that — but at least they won’t be completely overwhelmed.)
“At the same time, it’s great that the WSJ is putting lots of important information on its front page in sub-1,500-word form — on top of the ‘What’s News’ briefs. As a news consumer, I don’t even want anything nearly that long — I’m looking to get what I need within a few hundred words at most. US newspaper stories have a lot of water weight, and nearly all of them could stand to lose a few pounds.
“And what of the dramatic fall-off in the really long-form stuff, over 2,500 words? Up until 2007, those managed to make the front page roughly every other day. Then they all but disappeared, and you’ll find maybe one a month at this point.”
Read more here.