Morton Mintz

Born Jan. 26, 1922, was a reporter for 42 years, in St. Louis at the Star-Times and Globe-Democrat (1946-1958), and at the Washington Post (1958-1988).

The story of Dr. Frances O. Kelsey, a Food and Drug Administration (FDA) medical officer, preventing the sale of thalidomide, changed my life profoundly.

It’s the primary reason why I received a Nieman Fellowship. It’s why I became a first-time author with a blurb from the great John Kenneth Galbraith on the dust jacket of the book I wrote while at Harvard. It’s why I won my first journalism prizes. And it’s why I came to devote much of my last quarter-century as a Washington Post reporter to corporate crime and grave misconduct.

The story dealt a lasting blow to the then widely-held notion that science and technology always or nearly always produce benign results. This excerpt sums it up:

“In September 1960, the U. S. licensee of the German investor and manufacturer of thalidomide — a sedative or tranquilizer, depending on dosage — applied for FDA approval to sell it in the United States. Not until April 1962 did it become widely known that in numerous other countries, the mothers of several thousand thalidomide children had taken the drug during the first trimester of pregnancy. I interviewed Dr. Kelsey three months later — on Friday, the 13th of July.

“Seventeen days later, a Senate subcommittee led by Hubert Humphrey held an FDA oversight hearing at which it came out that in a promotional stunt, the licensee, the William S. Merrell Co., had contrived to give away 2.5 million so-called ‘experimental’ thalidomide pills to physicians, causing 10 American infants to be born with seal-like flippers rather than arms and legs.

“The story transformed Capitol Hill. Suddenly, Congress became a tiger, rushing to toughen the drug law by passing with what came to be called the Kefauver-Harris Amendments of 1962.”

“From the mid-1960s through much of the 1980s” — I’m quoting a 2002 article in The American Prospect — “Congress played an integral role in drug safety. Lawmakers [principally the late Reps. L.H. Fountain and Ted Weiss, but also including Gaylord Nelson and Ted Kennedy in the Senate] meticulously probed the regulatory histories of dubious drugs, uncovered FDA weaknesses and ordered corrections.”

The writer was Daniel Sigelman, who, as an investigator for Weiss, found that Eli Lilly, in the case of the anti-arthritis drug Oraflex, and Hoechst AG, in the case of the antidepressant Merital, had known of but failed to report many deaths of patients on these drugs. Thanks to the Weiss subcommittee’s digging, Lilly and Hoechst were criminally prosecuted.

I was privileged to cover all or nearly all of those oversight hearings even if at the Fountain and Weiss hearings I was alone at the press table much of the time.

Floyd Norris

Born Sept. 6, 1947, is the chief financial correspondent of The New York Times, where he has worked since 1988.  He previously was stock market editor at Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly and worked for both The Associated Press and United Press International.  He is the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards in business journalism — the Elliott V. Bell award from the New York Financial Writers’ Association in 1998, the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award administered by UCLA in 2003, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in 2008.

When I became a business journalist in the late 1970s – having gotten a job at the Associated Press despite a lack of experience, let alone expertise, in financial reporting  —  it seemed to me that too much of the reporting consisted of little more than, “He said this but she said that.”

How was the company doing? We quoted an analyst, who was presumed to be objective. Was the stock a good buy? Particularly diligent reporters found a short seller to disagree with the bullish analyst.

There was one shining example to the contrary: Carol Loomis.  Reading her articles in Fortune left me envious.  She didn’t quote some analyst about what a company’s financial statements showed.  She read them and told us what they meant.

Sometimes she figured out tricks companies were using that no one else had noticed, or at least no one had written about. Why couldn’t I do that?

In 1981, I was fortunate enough to get a Walter Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia University’s journalism school.  We were expected to take classes in the business school for a year, and I stayed for another two semesters and earned an MBA.  Accounting, and the games that could be played to make the numbers look better, fascinated me.

After leaving Columbia, I joined Barron’s as 1983 began, and soon took over the stock market column.  The previous writer, who had been at the magazine since 1959, had quit in anger after being passed over for a promotion.

(An aside:  During a taxi ride, I mentioned to Alan Abelson, the Barron’s editor who had given me the column, that 1959 was the year I had gotten out of sixth grade.  “How long were you in?” he replied. )

It was at Barron’s that I was introduced to the wonders of Disclosure Inc.  In those days, the only ways to get a company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were to go to the SEC reading room, get a company to send their own filings to you (probably by mail) or buy them from Disclosure. That company would messenger documents to you within a day – or within a couple of hours if you paid extra.

Barron’s had an account, and I came to abuse it.  Since I could not be sure exactly what filing would have a crucial fact about a company, why not buy them all?  Piles of paper would appear.  Bills for a single piece of research, which might or might not lead to an article, would sometimes exceed $1,000.  Nobody at Barron’s complained, and I found I could get information for the weekly that no one had published in the dailies.

I learned to read quarterly and annual reports from the back.  The footnotes were where the interesting stuff was buried.  So I would read them first.  I assumed the chairman’s letter was public relations propaganda, and usually skipped it.

I came to The Times as a financial columnist in 1988 and promptly opened a Disclosure account.

I also did something that I had never done before.  I called up a journalist and asked if I could talk to her about her work.  Carol Loomis said yes, and we had lunch.  She stunned me by telling me that before she wrote an article about a company, she read the last five annual reports, cover to cover.

Including the chairman’s letter?  Surely not.

Yes, she said. Those letters were valuable, especially the old ones.  Sometimes a promising new business or strategy was heralded one year, only to vanish without a trace a couple of years later.  Finding out what happened and why could be fascinating.

Since then, I have read those letters as well.

These days, young financial journalists know far more about finance, companies and markets than I did when I broke in.  An SEC filing can be on anyone’s computer screen almost immediately after it is filed, at no cost.

But SEC filings remain an underused resource. Companies release their earnings using news releases, and the actual financial statements can come out weeks later, ignored by reporters.  There are still gems in footnotes.

Hank Gilman

Born July 16, 1952. Gilman was the No. 2 editor at Fortune before leaving at the end of 2012. He spent 16 years at the magazine, including a stint as editor of Fortune Small Business. He was also the business editor of Newsweek from 1991 to 1996 and the assistant business editor and personal finance columnist of the Boston Globe from 1998 to 1991. He won the Lawrence Minard Editor Award from the Gerald Loeb Foundation in 2011.

It doesn’t seem so long ago — well, it doesn’t seem long ago to me — that the business section was the backwater of the daily newspaper. It was the place they sent you when a little zip went off your fastball.

The “business pages,” as we used to call them, were filled with such people — and management was too lazy to do anything about them. It was the Zombieland of journalism.

Of course, there were business magazines and The Wall Street Journal when I left college around 1976 or so. But econ-journalism wasn’t sexy. Not for kids weaned on Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein. Few of us had interest in crunching economic data, writing glowing pieces about fat cats and smoking cigars at the Harvard Club. (Not that I qualified.)

Unfortunately for me, I was an economics junkie. I read The Journal and BusinessWeek in college. Fortunately for me there were forces at work that would make business journalism the center of the universe.

In the 1980s there were three big trends, from my vantage point, that made stars out of business journalists and the publications that hired them.

The personal investing boom gets a lot of credit. The stock market was going crazy in the 1980s when I got into the business. And when the stock market goes up, everyone wants in on the game. For the reader, that meant an insatiable appetite for expert information. For publications, that meant a demand for journalists who could actually dole out that information. (In other words: kinda knew what they were talking about.) For financial advertisers, they needed to get their message out to the masses.

Hand-in-hand with the stock market boom, was the mergers and acquisitions explosion. You had great tales of back-office intrigue, colorful characters and, here and there, some good old law-breaking. Who can forget then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani and his Wall Street perp walks? Leveraged buyouts? Junk bonds? Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken? Great stuff.

Finally, there was the tech boom of the 1980s. IBM, Digital Equipment, the legendary Route 128 technology corridor in Massachusetts were among the icons. Mainframes vs. mini-computers vs. PCs. The young Michael Dell and Bill Gates — barely a PR posse in sight — would descend on the offices of The Wall Street Journal and other publications and tell tales of revolution. You just had to cover this stuff.

The result of all this? In my view, it allowed business journalism to take its rightful place among the politics, sports and entertainment beats. Long-form writing was prized. Business journalists who could also tell a good story were in demand. Daily newspapers from the New York Times to the Boston Globe expanded their business departments and even devoted separate sections to the topic.

Publications such as BusinessWeek hired scores of writers to cover the technology beats. (In fact, in the mid-’80s, it seemed like an arm’s race between the WSJ and BusinessWeek for talent and big stories.) For us reporters, well, we were paid far more than we ever expected when we left college. We could actually become a part of the upper-middle class and not have to marry well to do it.

But the biggest impact of all was that some of the country’s finest journalistic talent gravitated to business publications. At The Journal we had a slew of writers from the Ivies and other top schools with everything from law degrees to MBAs. When I was at The Journal in the mid-’80s, you could literally throw a stick and hit a future Pulitzer Prize winner.

That would never have happened — ever — in Zombieland.

Larry Ingrassia

Born 1952, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, was business editor for nine years, starting in 2004. Before that, he worked as reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal in various places – Chicago, Minneapolis, London, Boston and New York.

It was 1983, and I was a young reporter for The Wall Street Journal. I was interviewing the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, Gerald Corrigan (who would later become head of the New York Fed) not long after he had visited the Iron Range in Minnesota.

After giving a talk there about the economy, he told me, a hand shot up, and a mining union official in the audience asked: “Mr. Corrigan, I got a question for you. Why was M1 down $3 billion last week?”

It was a eureka moment for me: When you’ve got union guys in northern Minnesota asking a question like that, you know that the business pages are no longer just for executives in corner offices. Even local union officials knew that high inflation – then in the mid-teens – was damaging the economy, and having a direct impact on the livelihoods of their rank-and-file members.

Until around then, few people felt that business news was important to them. Yes, there have always been ups and downs in the economy. But outside corporate suites and Wall Street, not many readers paid much mind to economics.

Indeed, I think it is fair to say that – with few exceptions – the business of business reporting was a backwater at many newspapers, often a place to send reporters who weren’t aggressive enough for the national desk or the metro desk or who had performed many years of service and were coasting toward retirement. Newspaper reporting about business and the economy was dominated by The Wall Street Journal, which was considered a niche publication, and was mostly an afterthought everywhere else.

Flash forward to today, and that has changed, and how. The globalization of business in the 1970s and 1980s made economic news of interest to readers who never thought it mattered. For the first time, Americans found that their jobs were being directly affected by competitors overseas. Trade pacts – snore! – became front page news, along with trade deficit figures and the monthly jobs report.

Another milestone that increased interest in business news was financial deregulation. When the government deregulated savings deposits, and allowed people to take their money out of low-interest bank accounts and put it into money-market accounts with much higher yields, the average reader had to get educated real fast. Then there was the advent of 401(k) retirement funds and the shift away from traditional pensions. All of a sudden, a much larger percentage of Americans became direct investors in the stock market – for better or worse, in the unfortunate case for some people.

At times in the last few years, in fact, economic news has dominated coverage, even during presidential elections. Think about the financial meltdown of 2008, or the ongoing European debt crisis. Or how about the debate about health care, which is largely a debate over costs? Then there is technology, a truly global industry that is changing the way we live and work in ways that we are just beginning to understand. When I was a young reporter, there was no Microsoft, no Google, no Facebook, not even Apple. Today they are among the biggest and most recognizable companies on the planet.

No wonder that The New York Times has substantially increased the size of its business news staff in the past 15-20 years, and the fastest growing news organization is Bloomberg News, which itself didn’t exist until about 25 years ago.

My prediction for the next 25 years: More of the same. Global economic competition will grow. Job creation, technological innovation, tax policies, growing income inequality, energy production, retirement – all will be big issues around the world. All in the end, of course, are about money.

To the next generation of business and economic journalists: You’re covering what may be the biggest story of our time. Have at it, and do us proud.

Hal Ritter

Born January 2, 1952, has been AP business editor since 2008. He was business editor of the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y., and managing editor/Money of USA Today. He has a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas and an MBA from Stanford Business School. In 2000, Ritter was named one of the 100 greatest business journalists of the 20th century by TJFR and MasterCard.

What I’ve learned . . . in 19 years as a business editor (with apologies to Esquire):

Many financial journalists should be doing something else. Of course, you can say that about every occupation.

Those who fall short lack the desire to be the best. If you’re a bricklayer and don’t want to be the world’s best bricklayer, you should find another job.

Good writing is simple. I don’t mean easy. I mean if you write simply, your writing will be good.

Good writing is clear, concise, correct. Clear means simple sentences, for the most part. Concise means no unnecessary words. Correct means no grammar, usage or other mistakes. Few would disagree; even fewer master all three.

If you can’t write well, double down on your reporting. A good editor can shape a great story if the reporting is there.

Bone up on a topic before you start reporting. Become as expert as the experts you’ll interview.

Many expert sources aren’t. They spout conventional wisdom, or say things that are wrong. Don’t be afraid to push them around. Throw their quotes back and make them reconsider. And find expert sources who are.

Every editor has a reporter who tries to mask weak reporting with “fine writing.” Don’t do that to your editor.

If you report deeply, you can write authoritatively.

Every story has two parts – idea and execution. Execution – reporting, writing, editing – may take days or weeks. The idea part usually lasts a few minutes. Stretch it.

Ideas are the lifeblood of every newsroom.

Put every idea to a rigorous reader test. It matters little how much you and your editor like an idea. If readers don’t read your story, you’ve wasted your time.

Put the reader first. Those are four words to live by.

I’ve come to value critical thinking as much as any skill in a financial journalist.

Many quotes in stories are lame. Mostly, we can write better than people talk. A good quote is like the punch line of a joke.

No matter where you went to school or what courses you took, you have much to learn. There are many ways to learn on the job. Take advantage of them. Consider options outside work, such as classes in finance and economics at a university. Or take a break and get an MBA.

Financial statements should be as easy to read as a beach novel. And almost as enjoyable.

If you don’t love numbers, you’ll never make it as a financial journalist.

Read every story you write when it appears in print and compare it carefully with the story you turned in. If you have a good editor, that’s the easiest way to learn.

I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best financial journalists of our time. At two newspapers and The Associated Press. They helped me learn those things.

David Wessel

Born Feb. 21, 1954, is economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and writes the weekly Capital column. He is the author of two best-sellers, “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2008) and “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012). He was a Knight Bagehot fellow in 1980-81.

Is doing good business and economics journalism today (a) easier or (b) harder than it was when I started out more than 35 years ago?

The answer is yes.

When I joined the Middletown (Conn.) Press back in (gulp!) 1975,  I realized that we over-covered local government and we under-covered the businesses that employed our readers.

We had a unit of Gulf + Western in the town, so I ordered a copy of its 10-K.  This was the pre-Internet era so it came by mail, pages and pages of it. I think it was about four inches thick.   I never did find a story in there.

Things have changed a lot since, then. The Middletown Press is a shadow of its former self and Gulf + Western is long gone.

But imagine a young naïve reporter plunging into a similar story today.  He or she probably is better prepared for the job; our younger reporters are better educated than my generation was.  The documents, of course, are all on line – and are easily searchable.  So are transcripts of executives’ conference calls with analysts.

With a few minutes on Google, and the reporter easily can find all sorts of relevant perspectives on whatever the local factory makes. With Facebook and LinkedIn, the reporter probably can find half a dozen sources, perhaps people who have recently left the company.

And a wealth of easily available data can be dropped into a spreadsheet – as essential to modern reporting as a notepad was in 1975 – to see things that aren’t immediately obvious and to make charts and graphs that illuminate stories for our readers.

So it’s a cinch, right?  I wish.

First, many of the journalistic enterprises for which we work – print, broadcast, online – are increasingly starved for resources.  It’s harder to find time to learn enough about a company or topic to do the really smart story and report those ‘aha!’ facts.   Second, the complexity of the companies we cover – and the sophistication of their PR operations – has grown faster than the smarts and quality of reporters.  We’re better than we were, but we haven’t kept up.  The failure of the press, with some notable exceptions, to identify and shout about the excesses that preceded the financial crisis is all the evidence you need.

Three, business is global; most of us still aren’t.

Four, when I started out, a lot of business executives thought we were stupid; now a lot of them thing we’re evil or out to get them.  Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they just don’t like what they see in the mirror we hold up to them.

Some things haven’t changed. Perhaps the most important one is this:  Covering business and the economy isn’t like covering sports.  It’s not a game; it’s real life with real consequences for real people.  And the ones with the most points (aka dollars) aren’t always the ultimate winners or the smartest players on the field.

Linda O’Bryon

O’Bryon is the president of South Carolina ETV, based in Columbia, SC. ETV is the public media network for the state with 19 television and radio stations. She is the founding executive editor of “Nightly Business Repor”t and was one of the two original co-anchors for the program. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C.

Business news is dominated by numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, interest rates, home prices, quantitative easing strategies, and a myriad of financial indices that are reported daily.

But business news is not all about numbers. Early in my business journalism career, I realized that like so many other fields in journalism, good story telling and the people behind the numbers are what provide substance and staying power.

As I mapped out my approach to business news, I often tried to look for the human interest angle. The unexpected. The story behind the story.

The story I found that was most compelling came not from New York or Washington but from Omaha, Neb. It was a story we produced for “Nightly Business Report” in 1994 about Rose Blumkin, better known as “Mrs. B.” At the time I interviewed her, she was 100 years old. She founded Nebraska Furniture Mart, the nation’s largest furniture store under one roof.

Mrs. B came to the United States from Russia when she was just a young girl. She wanted to make a good life for her mother, whom she called “my princess.” She said in the interview, “I came from Russia 75 years ago. I started in the basement. Never lied. Never cheated. Never been a big shot.” It was a story Mrs. B loved recounting with her customers.

And when we caught up with Mrs. B, she was still active in the carpet division of the company she founded. Her agility with numbers impressed her customers. They would come in and tell her the size of the room they needed for carpeting. Without a calculator, she told them how many yards were needed and the price.

Her hard work and drive led to a successful furniture business that was eventually acquired by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett talked about Mrs. B’s great ability to know how to deliver the best value to the customer and to “outwork” everyone else. He said, “She knows what she knows and knows what she doesn’t know. She defines what I call her circle of competence perfectly.”

We visited Mrs. B on a later trip to Omaha, and she was still working at the store, where she continued to use a golf cart to get around the expansive store. Mrs. B died in 1998 at the age of 104.

There are some basics from which we can all draw. Mrs. B’s values of hard work and honesty built the business. She showed that one person can make a difference for any organization. Her facility with numbers was a big factor in her success.

But it was her personal story that was the standout. Numbers are the daily language of tracking business and markets, and we need those numbers. Stories about people provide the fabric and the texture of business news.

Byron “Barney” Calame

Born April 14, 1938, and worked at The Wall Street Journal for 39 years, the last 12 of those as deputy managing editor. After retiring in 2004, he served a two-year term as public editor at The New York Times.

The crucial search for a business model that will enable journalism to survive in the decades ahead is yielding a wide variety of ideas about possible sources of revenue.

But few raise as many questions for me as the “sponsored content” turning up in a growing number of online publications. In these arrangements, advertisers often cough up extra dollars to publish articles of their crafting that are packaged to disguise as much as possible that they are advertisements.

I think business journalists need to keep an eye on this concept as the Society of American Business Editors and Writers enters its second half-century because corporations seem to be key users of sponsored content to address issues that concern them.

Theoretically, these corporate messages designed to avoid being perceived as advertisements could attempt to counter or contradict real news stories on the same page. More broadly, I worry about the legitimacy news columns have earned as a source of fair and impartial coverage of events — thanks to thousands of professional journalists over the years.

Could that legitimacy, I wonder, eventually be undermined if contradictory paid content on the same page leaves confused readers doubting even the real stories?

Some talented and dedicated editors and their business-side colleagues see sponsored content — especially when it carries a premium ad rate — as a potentially vital source of revenue in their struggle to survive. Most of them also insist that readers can actually get interesting and useful information from the corporate content even though it may be related to the company’s business and promote its interests.

Despite the importance of the struggle for survival, however, I am bothered by a couple of nagging questions that sponsored content seems to pose for a publication. How ethical is the publication’s role in the arrangement when the fundamental underlying goal is to hoodwink its readers into not realizing an advertisement is an advertisement? And is it unseemly for a publication to ask advertisers to pay a premium to be allowed to try to beguile its readers by disguising advertisements?

The effort to disguise the paid content starts with basics. The word “advertisement” — long a standard reader alert required for “advertorials” or any paid content not in display format — is almost never seen.

Taking its place are euphemisms such as “BrandVoice” or “Bulletin,” usually accompanied by the company name or logo. The headline and text type of the sponsored content on some sites is strikingly matched to that of the publication’s real news stories.

Editors offering sponsored content can point to some subtle signals that they do require advertisers to provide to distinguish it from real news stories. Although sponsored content on some sites is intermingled with news stories, other publications group the paid articles in one place on the home page. Or the background for paid content is a slightly different hue.

Given the leeway advertisers now have to make their advertisement seem more like an op-ed pieces or an article by an outside contributor, I fear it will be hard for publications to ever get much of the genie back in the bottle.