2001 News: Business Journalism: Is the Boom Over?Speech presented by Martin "Marty" Baron, Editor, The Boston Globe

Business Reporting and Writing Conference
Monday, October 15, Chicago

On September 11, life changed for America and for most Americans. And it certainly changed for American business.

But for all of you, American business writers and editors, life had already changed.

That may not have been entirely evident to you. There was no one traumatic event. There is no date you can point to. No buildings fell. No lives were lost. Nothing to compare with the attacks of September 11.

But this year and last, the conditions that led to a boom in business reporting began to slip away. Conditions that gave you additional staff, that gave you so much additional space. Conditions that provided your special sections and that fostered some related conferences in personal finance and technology.

It is hard for many to recall the days when business reporting occupied only a remote corner of the newsroom, when staffing even at the biggest papers numbered no more than a reporter or two and an editor and copy editor, when the section was tucked behind the sports section, when newspapers felt they had fulfilled their obligations by publishing nothing more than a section called Business Monday.

The roots of contemporary, more sophisticated, more robust business reporting lie in the events of the late 1970s, when interest rates were deregulated in an environment of rampant inflation. It was then that ordinary investors began to pay closer attention to the management of their own money. It was then that editors in chief began to notice the impact of economics—even international economics, through the escalating price of oil –on the lives or ordinary readers. And it was then that publishers began to notice a surge in advertising from banks, money market mutual funds and other financial institutions as they sought to entice investors with competitive interest rates.

Individual retirement accounts and 401ks gave investors extra reason to pay close attention to their own finances. And the mutual fund industry showed itself remarkably creative, developing a bewildering array of specialized funds.

The flowering of business journalism did not occur because the scales suddenly fell from the eyes of top editors, because the coverage they had once ignored suddenly became interesting.

Since 1979, business journalism has seen extraordinary growth, and as I recall, this very organization began to flourish shortly thereafter.

During the 1990s, business journalism got an additional boost in other ways:

For a full decade, the nation was able to escape a recession or even a significant economic slowdown.

Investors and financial companies benefited from a breathtaking stock market ascent.

Americans warmed to personal computers and all sorts of new technology, including personal digital assistants and cell phones.
The Internet was producing wealth at a stunning clip, and most importantly created a business in which market share rather than earnings was the model and measure of success.

A tight job market had companies fighting for new recruits.

Of course, this meant that all the conditions were in place for a boom in business journalism.

All of you were the beneficiaries … Congratulations.

And now, condolences. That boom is over.

“Over” in the sense that there won’t be more and more and more of you with each passing year. “Over” in the sense that your sections probably won’t get fatter. “Over” in the sense that you probably won’t be publishing ever more special sections.

Quite honestly, you’ve had it easy until now. You have enjoyed a windfall.

Like many of the industries you cover, business journalism had its bubble. That bubble has now been popped.

I want to be clear. I don’t say this with any glee. That, I’ll save for the instant Internet millionaires who now aren’t.

I was delighted to see the growth of business journalism, which was long neglected. Business is obviously one of the powerful, driving forces of American society. Business, as much as government, has shaped America.

News organizations were remiss in ignoring the subject for so long.

My own roots in business journalism go deep. I have a business degree. I was a business reporter. I was a business editor. As the editor of the Boston Globe and previously The Miami Herald, I have encouraged and am encouraging high-end business journalism.

But the days of ever more resources for business journalism are probably over:

• Internet advertising has dried up. The companies that so frantically sought market share have largely vanished, along with their reckless spending.
• Investors are feeling burned by the stock market. Day trading is a distant memory, and mutual funds no longer look so attractive. Who wants to think about the long term when you’re feeling so poor in the short term?
• The personal computer has acquired commodity status, and just about everyone has one. Yes, there will be technological innovations, but it’s hard to imagine anything in the near future that is quite like the proliferation of new gizmos we saw in the 1990s.
• Newspapers’ share of employment-related advertising is slipping because of the challenge posed by Monster.com and others like it.
  Investors are finding more of their personal finance information on the Internet, eroding the allure of business sections for many readers. Those who once turned to newspapers for stock listings now look on the web, where they find every sort of technical or narrative analysis and supporting data they could hope for.
• Finally, the overall financial pressures on newspapers are greater than ever before. And, with the escalation of newsprint costs, newspapers are looking more skeptically than ever on expensive, largely ad-free pages of financial agate.

OK, so you have a few problems.

Should you panic? No.

If the boom is over, then is business journalism headed for a decline? No.

Does this mean we’ve seen the end of a golden age of business journalism? No.

WE HAVE YET TO SEE A GOLDEN AGE!

Which ultimately is my point – and what I want to focus on here.

For perhaps two decades now, the growth of business journalism has been driven by advertising and marketing initiatives. There was money to be made by expanding business journalism—because more advertising, it was believed, would follow.

A technology section would bring more tech ads. Personal finance pages would bring advertising from mutual funds and banks and insurance companies. Workplace pages would enhance classified sections – or even bring in display ads from companies eager to find qualified new employees.

This led to more coverage. And that’s fine. If that’s what it took to get the attention of publishers and editors, then so be it. It meant business journalism would be nurtured, and that ultimately it would mature over time.

But it also meant some limits on business journalism – and business journalism has some distance to go before it fully matures, at least at most newspapers.

Many business journalists are occupied with filling holes – the half-page adjacencies to the classifieds, the one-third page for a technology column, the weekly personal finance feature that was invented when the business section was expanded with the idea of garnering more mutual fund advertising.

This is not to say that these holes aren’t filled with good work. In many instances, they are.

But in many instances, they’re not. Sights are set low. The work is slapdash. The coverage is superficial. Insights are few.

But now as the boom time ends for business journalism, it is time for business journalists to be more ambitious, to set their sights higher, to routinely produce the finest journalism in America.

You cannot rely on the prospect of additional advertising to make the case for additional business reporting.

What will make your case? The quality of your reporting. The inventiveness of your ideas. The appeal to a broad audience, broader than executives and investors. The allure of your writing. The clear evidence that your stories are relevant to the ordinary lives of ordinary people.

The Wall Street Journal, in my view, is your model. It has long produced some of America’s finest journalism, winning a regular string of Pulitzers and other prizes –and, more importantly, earning fierce loyalty from its readers.

Those readers value the Journal’s rare combination of sophistication and readability. They value its well-developed craft of storytelling. They value the thoroughness of its reporting, its insistence on digging deep, its willingness to zig when others zag, its ability to find unique stories when America’s journalistic herd seems to have covered every conceivable angle. They value its aggressiveness, its ability to seize on a big business story and cover it with the ferocity that a metro staff might give to a case of mass murder.

The Journal, of course, is not the only paper to do this. The Los Angeles Times has won acclaim and a Pulitzer for its coverage of the music industry. It has also won a Pulitzer for its investigative examination of the expedited drug approval process at the FDA – a business/government/medicine story written by a non-business reporter in Washington.

The Seattle Times has won a Pulitzer for its coverage of Boeing safety issues. The New York Times has won a Pulitzer for its coverage of tax policy.

So there is great work out there.

I just wish there were more of it.

Considering the resources that general circulation newspapers have poured into business journalism, there should be.

Many business journalists, I sense, feel that their work is not adequately recognized by those outside their field. They suspect that other journalists just don’t understand business journalism, don’t appreciate it, won’t reward it.

As a former business journalist, I’d have to say there may be some measure of that. But not much. Certainly not nearly as much as business journalists imagine.

The problem lies with business journalists themselves. Too many have taken a narrow view of their own mission.

They write about business as if their only audience were business executives.

Too often, they measure business exclusively on its own terms, in terms of earnings or stock price rather than in terms of social policy or safety or its impact on consumers or the workplace.

You dazzled us with tales of overnight Internet millionaires and marveled at the kudzu-like expansion of the web. But there were too few tales of suspect accounting among Internet firms, too few tales of how the wall between investment banking promoters and stock research had been routinely breached, too few questions about whether there was a real stand-alone business there.

(Is there a stand-alone business there?)

Putting things into the context of today’s events, how is it that we read so much about airline delays but very little about how airlines had resisted one effort after the next to buttress airline safety and airport security?

Too often, business journalists react slowly to stories of major import. Too often, business journalists are reluctant to leave the office in order to make sources. Too often, they see their sources as largely executives and quotable but conflicted analysts, rather than lower-level workers and suppliers and distributors and regulators and law enforcement officials and competitors. Too many are too comfortable with the conventional work day and the conventional work week.

Business stands as a powerful influence on American society. Most of us depend for our work on businesses, not on government. At every moment of the day, our tools for living are those created by business, not government. If we hope to prosper in retirement, it is mostly because of money we have invested in business, not because of the protection provided by government.

Boom times for business journalism may be coming to an end, but the golden age has yet to arrive. This is a good opportunity to think less about doing more – and to think more about doing better.

• To improve the story-telling in business stories.
• To think more creatively, more inventively about story ideas.
• To break out of the conventions of business reporting that accompanied rapid expansion and advertising adjacencies and special sections.
• Break out of your comfort zone. Surprise your readers.
• Use this moment to make a giant leap forward in the quality of your work.

The boom times for business journalism may be over. But your ideas and your energy can still make this business journalism’s Golden Age.