By Katie Reilly

Profiles of former Lehman Brothers CFO Erin Callan are noticeably different from those written about her male colleagues.

A 2012 article for Business Insider described her as “well-heeled.” A 2008 article in The Wall Street Journal included a photo with the caption, “Erin Callan is known for being frank, fashionable.” A Wall Street Journal blog post about Callan with the headline “High on Heels: How Shoes Affect the Juggle” soon followed.

Heidi Moore, now the business editor at Mashable, remembers that article and others like it all too well.

“She was wearing what women wear in bond departments of investment banks, you know, an incredibly sophisticated outfit with stiletto heels — because stiletto heels show power on a trading floor — and this came in for a great deal of comment,” Moore said. “What signals was she sending? Is this an appropriate way to be dressed? It just started this whole conversation around her look and her image, whereas Dick Fuld, who was the CEO of Lehman Brothers, could just show up in a suit and everyone would just accept that he was appropriately dressed.”

Callan’s situation exemplifies the media challenges long encountered by businesswomen, who often receive a skewed kind of coverage, if any at all. It’s a problem that many of today’s business journalists and editors are aware of — one that many are trying to combat with a variety of solutions because the stakes are higher than stiletto heels and the future of quality journalism demands it.

Addressing a complex problem

In a survey of 16,800 stories across 45 news outlets, a 2005 Pew Research Center study found that only a third of stories contain even one female source — even though, at the time, 42 percent of people working in management, business and financial operations were women. Comparatively, the study found that more than three quarters of stories contain male sources.

Broken down further, in 438 business stories, 67 percent included no female sources and just 33 percent included one or more. Meanwhile, just 40 percent of those business stories included no male sources.

The old problem has proven to be difficult to fix.

“Years ago, when I was at Reuters writing a stock market close, I specifically used just women for the stock market close story, but failed and ended up having three women and a token male,” said Betty Wong, (right) the former global managing editor for Reuters.

Wong said she recently examined what she calls the standard “bread-and-butter stories” of financial journalism: U.S. stock markets report, corporate earnings and deal stories. She thinks those stories, in particular, have no excuse for failing to include women or minorities because, unlike breaking stories, they can be anticipated and prepared for daily.

Alecia Swasy, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who now teaches at the University of Illinois, said women have historically been underrepresented in business news stories because major corporations were run by men.

“That’s still true today because we’re still writing stories when a woman is named a CEO with the second graf always being, ‘She becomes the X-number woman to be named a CEO.’ Whereas, when a man is promoted, you don’t have to say that,” Swasy said.

“As journalists, we have to reflect the reality. There might be plenty of women in public relations jobs, but when it comes to the seats of power, they’re still in the minority.”

The gender gap in the field of economics has been widely acknowledged. A 2013 article entitled “Where Are the Women?” published in Econ Focus, the economics magazine of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, noted that women earned just 34 percent of economics Ph.D.s in 2011. That’s the lowest percentage among any of the social sciences. Comparatively, women earned 46 percent of all doctorate degrees.

From assistant professor to associate professor to full professor, the percentage of women in each position grows consistently smaller with higher academic posts.

Moore said this power imbalance often leads women to decline to comment in stories, even if they believe women need more representation.

“Women in business have to work a lot harder to get where they’re going, and they become very wary of anything that could hurt their chances, and that includes a high profile,” she said.

“A lot of women in business I’ve talked to — whether they’re entrepreneurs or at the top of very big firms — all talk privately about that same fear, which is the more prominent they get, the more arrows are aimed at them.”

Attempting a solution

Jennifer Pozner founded Women in Media and News in 2001, when she said there were no other national media organizations working to amplify women’s presence and power in public debate. She’s now made a career of it, teaching others about journalistic coverage of women and giving talks entitled, “Hillary Clinton is a Size 8 and Other Useless Things I’ve Learned from the News.”

By the early 2000s, Pozner had become frustrated by the comparatively small number of women who were quoted in a variety of news sources. She said there weren’t any tools to combat what she described as predictable responses from media outlets about why women were underrepresented.

“Whether it was studies about the fact that women were very, very rarely published on the op-ed pages in the top newspapers across the country or very rarely heard from as pundits in the broadcast and cable news sphere or whether it was the fact that women were very rarely quoted in stories about economics and stories about foreign affairs and business policy,” Pozner said.

“The only time, generally, statistically, that you’d even find women’s voices even approaching an equitable level in news would be in the style sections — stories about which pashmina to wear for fall and which starlet was having sex with which actor.”

As Pozner sees it, the repercussions of that lack of representation extend far beyond a single story.

“When you have half the population being either marginalized, erased or deeply trivialized in journalism, that is a threat not only to women, it is a threat to democracy,” she said.

“It makes it impossible to understand where a country wants to go in terms of, say, responses to military action or to domestic policy issues. And it makes it very difficult to ever effect social change.”

Pozner said the responses she received when she raised the issue varied greatly. Some editors and producers told her they’d love to quote more women — if only there were women who were qualified to be sources on the issue. Others told her their job was not to make social change for women but to produce good journalism using the best available voices.

Pozner’s solution came in the form of the Perspectives Of Women Expand Reporting (POWER) Sources Project, a direct response to the two excuses she heard repeatedly. The project created a database of diverse female sources — women of different ages, ethnic groups, races and socioeconomic statuses.

It launched with the goal of easily and quickly providing journalists with a qualified pool of new sources — all of whom were, importantly, also women.

At its height, the POWER Sources database included 2,000 names, though maintaining and updating that database is difficult

Pozner believes the problem is still present today, though she thinks Women in Media and News has made progress since 2001.

“We haven’t changed everything in 10 years, but there has been slow and steady increase of the numbers of women who appear as sources in journalism and the number of women who are heard as voices in their field,” she said.

Wong said her own solution was to push to diversify the reporting and editing ranks at Reuters in the hopes that a more diverse newsroom would produce articles with a diversity of sources who could more accurately tell the stories of readers.

“It’s harder to press that in places like Reuters and Bloomberg, to some extent, because if the main audience is people on Wall Street and investment bankers, for a long time, that was a white male population,” Wong said. “And you couldn’t really argue that you had to diversify the newsroom because of the audience. You could only hope that a wide range of stories and a range of opinions is what diversity brings. I really pushed that.”

Amanda Bennett, (right) former executive editor for projects and investigation at Bloomberg News, helped launch the Bloomberg News Women’s Project in 2010 with the goal of covering women and women’s issues more seriously on a global scale, including the Saudi women’s driving movement and early coverage of General Motors CEO Mary Barra.

“Our point was: there are many, many, many legitimate female sources that are not making their way into your stories because you’re using coverage lists and source lists that are 10 years old. You need to go out and look for legitimate female sources,” Bennett said.

The initiative has been responsible for thousands of women-focused stories each year.

In March of this year, Matt Winkler, who recently stepped down as editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News, participated in a United Nations panel about women and the media. He said key changes at Bloomberg included identifying women who are influential in every field and insisting there be a woman’s voice in every story.

Bennett attributed much of the success of the Women’s Project to Winkler’s support at the top of the news organization. Pozner agreed that the best solution to underrepresentation is a top-down institutional priority.

“Nothing changes on an institutional level in journalism without it becoming a policy, a de facto or explicit policy,” she said.

Pozner said feedback on the POWER Sources Project from most journalists and news organizations has been positive, suggesting the sourcing imbalance is caused more by a lack of resources than a sexist disposition within newsrooms.

“For most journalists, they’re not going about filing their stories thinking about the gender or racial component of their source pool,” Pozner said. “They’re going about their story thinking, ‘Got to get this done, and then I’ve got to get the new story done and I hope it’s accurate, and my newspaper’s cleared half the fact checkers that they used to have on staff.”

Changing the standards

The Telecommunications Act of 1996 enabled a wave of media mergers, which forced many media organizations to make cuts and many newsrooms to downsize — something Pozner thinks inhibited diverse news coverage.

The American Society of News Editors’ annual census tracks the number of full-time professional news jobs at newspapers in the U.S. That number has fallen from a peak of 56,400 in 2000 to 36,700 in 2014.

“There are any number of ways that media mergers and media consolidation negatively impact the production of journalism and trickle down to reinforcing the fact that journalists will often end up having to call the same five white guys in suits that have been in their Rolodex for 15 to 20 years as sources,” Pozner said.

Moving forward, Bennett thinks all news organizations have a lot of progress to make in terms of how they portray women, how aggressively they look for legitimate female sources and how well they track rising female leaders at companies.

Moore predicts a generational shift will make it more acceptable to be a prominent woman in business — and, therefore, more acceptable to be quoted as one.

If Pozner has any say in it, that shift will coincide with changing standards and priorities at news organizations across the board, both business and otherwise.

“Imagine if in addition to accuracy and an attempt at balanced fair reporting, another standard that you just absolutely had to accommodate in the production of journalism was equitably representing the population that journalists are meant to serve,” Pozner said. “Wouldn’t it be interesting if one of the things that mattered structurally, institutionally, was how diverse was your source pool?”

Katie Reilly is a senior journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill. She will intern this summer at Reuters.

By Max Wilhelm

On a November night in 2014, Sarah Lacy was redoing her home security system.

The 38-year-old investigative journalist recently heard that Emil Michael, a senior vice president of business for Uber, had publicly boasted of a $1 million smear campaign to spy on journalists covering Uber.[1]

The popular San Francisco-based ride-sharing service had faced a barrage of criticism since its founding, mostly targeting the company’s “bro-ish” culture and insensitivity to its female customers. Lacy, (right) the editor-in-chief and founder of technology news website PandoDaily, knew that she was a likely target in Uber’s campaign against journalists.

Lacy had recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny” after the company appeared to be working with a French escort service. Michael’s plan to discredit journalists by “digging up dirt” on their personal lives seemed like a gross violation of her privacy, a violation that she could not easily forgive.

“Paula Deen made racially insensitive comments and lost a show, lost very real money. Donald Sterling was forced to sell an NBA team,” Lacy said. “And yet we believe that frighteningly misogynist comments like this, anti-First Amendments comments like this, are ‘boys being boys’ and that ‘they’re geniuses and this is what it takes to build a company.’’

In response, Uber publicly denounced Michael’s statements, saying that “We have not, do not and will not investigate journalists.” While some might attribute this seemingly Orwellian plan to Silicon Valley hubris, the truth is that corporate spying on journalists is not a new phenomenon.

General Motors vs. Ralph Nader

One of the most famous cases of companies spying on critics traces back to a young attorney named Ralph Nader in 1966. Nader had written a mildly successful book called Unsafe at Any Speed which criticized General Motors for design flaws leading to unnecessary accidents and deaths in the 1960-1964 Chevrolet Corvair models. Months later, Nader suspected that he was being followed, and later heard reports of strangers asking his friends and family about his personal affairs.[2]

Nader eventually learned that General Motors hired a private investigation firm to dig into his personal life in order to discredit his future testimony in a Congressional hearing against the company.

On March 9, 1966, General Motors admitted the company did track Nader “for routine matters” but never admitted to the widely believed intention of attempting to discredit witness testimony from Nader.

During these four decades separating Ralph Nader and Sarah Lacy, advances in technology, communications, and globalization dramatically altered the landscape of American business. However, one of the darker business practices has remained intact.

This practice is corporate espionage.

The major difference in modern-day corporate espionage is that companies are better at gathering the information they want, and a lot harder to catch in the act.

While corporate espionage traditionally refers to companies spying on their competitors to gain a strategic edge, it can also refer to companies spying on the journalists who cover them.

Any company with an investigative division would prefer a less grating term over corporate espionage such as competitive intelligence, or market research analysis. However, these business arms of America’s corporate machine are responsible for many of the chilling cases of corporate espionage in the history of American business, cases that include spying and intimidating journalists.

These divisions are made up of the most talented intelligence analysts and sleuths around, including former agents of the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Secret Service.[3] As agents of the firm, they have a relatively simple mission. They gather and use intelligence to protect the firm’s bottom line.

The structure of large, publicly owned companies requires constant growth in profit and share price. The motivation to continuously improve means companies are heavily suspicious of any coverage which can damage business. To prevent bad press, companies have gone to great lengths to keep their brand and share price intact, and investigative journalists are frequently the prime target.

The Case of Hewlett-Packard

Hewlett-Packard is another modern example of a company that initiated a large espionage case against journalists covering their firm. In 2006, it was revealed that Hewlett-Packard illegally obtained the phone records of several board members and journalists in an effort to find a board member leaking confidential, strategic information to the press.

One story in particular speaks to the unsettling power and boldness of corporations trying to protect their image. During this Hewlett-Packard spy campaign, Chairwoman Patricia Dunn authorized the creation of an elaborate scheme to track journalists involving a fictional Hewlett-Packard employee named Jacob.

Jacob was set up as a lure for CNET reporter Dawn Kawamoto, (right) who was believed to be in regular contact with the board mole. After releasing a few credible stories to gain her trust, Jacob sent an email to Kawamoto loaded with spyware that would record every keystroke she made in a sophisticated effort to track her source.[4]

These surveillance strategies, many which were against the law, resulted in Chairwoman Dunn and a half-dozen other top Hewlett-Packard executives losing their jobs. The company was also ordered to pay over $20 million in fines.

The cases of Hewlett-Packard, General Motors, and Uber exhibit the lengths companies will go to protect their market share and brand image. While extreme, these case of corporate espionage are possibly just one of many other cases that have remained secret.

The truth is that no one knows exactly how large the market is for corporate espionage, or how much spying on journalists, executives, and employees actually occurs. However, we do know that companies are willing to pay a premium for access to hidden information.

Gartner, a leading technology research and advisory firm based in Connecticut, estimated the competitive intelligence industry at around $30 billion in 2013. This industry is only expected to grow as big data becomes more prevalent and valuable for corporate strategy.[5]

Many might wonder why corporations would engage in such questionable behavior, which seems reckless given these companies are often in the media spotlight. By looking at the risks and rewards of corporate espionage, one can better understand why this practice remains in use today.

As representatives of shareholders, it is the board of directors’ responsibility to maximize shareholder value. Therefore, spying on journalists who have the potential to hurt shareholder value, in addition to the boards’ jobs, can be seen as a viable strategy for the company’s health.

It does not help the case of journalists that companies who get caught in the act of corporate espionage have faced historically low penalties. After Hewlett-Packard was caught illegally monitoring board members and journalists, the company faced a fine of roughly $20 million, or just around 0.02 percent of revenue the year before.[6]

Considering this miniscule penalty in addition to the roughly 23 percent rise in Hewlett-Packard’s share price over the year following the scandal, one can imagine why a board of directors might frequently make decisions favoring money over ethics.[7]

The example of Uber also demonstrates how profit triumphs over ethics in the minds of investors. Not even one month after Uber’s supposed plan to spy on journalists like Sarah Lacy became public, a new round of funding valued the 5-year-old company at over $40 billion[8].

It is clear that companies have far greater resources and personnel to monitor journalists than journalists have to monitor companies. So how do journalists react with all the odds seemingly stacked up against them?

Not a serious problem?

For the most part, they do not believe there to be a serious problem.

Investigative journalists work with the belief that companies are not evil, and that it is natural for these institutions to learn about the people who write about them. They believe that there is a healthy yet competitive relationship that serves the best interests of media and the companies they cover.

Companies need the media to generate brand recognition and good press, and the media needs companies to build stories about the company, its competitors, and the industry that people will want to read.

Ben Smith, the editor-in-chief at Buzzfeed and one of the first to report on the Uber scandal, believes the relationship between the media and companies to be a healthy one.

“We don’t view our role as ‘combating’ the companies we cover. Adversarial relationships are both normal and healthy,” Smith said.[9]

One might expect to hear some bitterness after Smith’s exposure to the Uber executive talking about “digging up dirt” on journalists’ personal lives. However, he adopts an attitude of taking the high road, acknowledging that there can sometimes be bad eggs who do not represent the company culture.

In regards to the media and corporate relationship Smith also said, “Companies typically respect journalists who give them fair and tough coverage. Our reporter covering Uber, Johana Bhuiyan, has not had problems with access.”

It seems apparent that many journalists do not hold grudges, and that they are comfortable with a bit of a competitive relationship.

While the relationship is generally amicable, there are some investigative reporters that have been exposed to the darkest elements of the media and corporate relationship.

Diana Henriques, (right) an award-winning financial journalist and a New York Times best-selling author on financial events and scandals, is one such journalist.

During her 12-year career at The Times and other publications, she has had a front-row seat into how different companies work with journalists. Overall, Henriques finds no problem with companies performing normal due diligence into a journalist covering them.

“Any competent public relations professional is going to research a reporter’s public track record after getting an interview request, and I don’t find anything offensive about that,” Henriques said.[10]

Henriques states an example of a journalist covering a company who might also have been paid for speaking events by an advocacy group hostile to that company. In this scenario, she believes a company has every right to refuse an interview request by this journalist.

However, reasonable inquiry into a journalist’s professional career is not always where companies draw the line, as Henriques has personally discovered.

“I have had only a few encounters with that sort of bullying research [corporate spying], most memorably by the Ponzi scheming CEO of a debt-collection agency who traveled everywhere with armed guards and who left threatening messages on my voice mail making it clear that he knew where I lived,” Henriques said.

On a separate case, Henriques said she was trailed by a private investigator 24/7, a time which she described as “a little unsettling”. These are the only events of corporate spying that she has encountered in her 40-year career as an investigative journalist, but they are enough to leave a mark.

Dan Kane, investigative reporter for The (Raleigh) News & Observer, is an example of a journalist exposed to intimidation tactics, though from a different source.

Kane was the first to break the story of the widespread academic negligence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, starting a chain of events that culminated in a federal investigation and the withdrawing of former Chancellor Holden Thorp. Soon after releasing his research on the academic scandal, Kane said he was exposed to numerous threats from the UNC-CH fan base, including threats against him and his wife’s safety.[11]

Kane never became aware of a university-led investigation led into his personal affairs, but he did find that the school cut off all ties with him in a damage control campaign to prevent any more bad press.

“After that Julius Peppers mess it was very hard to get people to talk to me on the phone or in person,” Kane said. “It shouldn’t be that way.”

Companies and institutions who take a strong-armed or closed-door approach against media exposure can lose more than the public’s trust. Henriques believes that it erodes the entire corporate-media relationship that is essential for companies.

In regards to the intimidation tactics taken against her, Henriques said, ”Knowledge about that kind of research being conducted can introduce a strong adversarial tone to the relationship right out of the blocks, which is unfortunate for both sides…opposition research can sometimes push reporters into that posture despite their best effort to be fair and diplomatic.

“That can only backfire for the company, which loses any opportunity to open a constructive dialogue with the reporter and which risks coming across to the public as a bully with something to hide.”

While corporate spying is a serious problem, the truth is that extreme cases of corporate bullying rarely happen.

Arguably the rise of social media has facilitated greater public awareness of businesses, and makes spying on individuals riskier. When it does happen, it is generally rooted in the personalities of the company’s top executives who might believe themselves to be larger than ethical business practices, an opinion that Sarah Lacy seems to have of Uber.

“I’ve never heard of a very high-ranking executive at a $20 billion company talking about a million-dollar budget to destroy my life,” Lacy said. “I’ve never heard of a case where someone was bragging about it at a dinner, where it was considered socially acceptable.”

While companies can often be the source of the problem, the responsibility to prevent this type of destructive behavior does not solely rest on companies. Journalists must be held to the same professional standard as the companies they cover by striving to remain impartial.

“A reporter has the same obligation to be held accountable for her professional performance. And that means avoiding associations, activities and assignments that can be reasonably challenged as conflicts of interest,” Henriques said.

In and of itself, companies researching the professional background of reporters is not a vicious act. It is a necessary process to facilitate ties within the media and companies, although it can never entail “digging up dirt” on reporters’ personal lives to discredit their research.

The mystery lies in where the line is drawn.

[1]Nellie, B. (2014, November 18). Sarah Lacy on Exec’s Plan to Smear Her: “Every Woman Using Uber Should Be Scared.”. Retrieved April 29, 2015.

[2] Jack Doyle, “GM & Ralph Nader, 1965-1971,” PopHistoryDig.com, March 31, 2013.

[3] The Fifth Surveillance: Corporate Spying On Non-Profits | Techdirt (Techdirt.) https://www.techdirt.com/articles//850/fifth-surveillance-corporate-spying-non-profits.shtml

[4] Martin, P. (2006, October 2). Hewlett-Packard spying scandal sheds new light on US corporate “ethics”. Retrieved April 15, 2015.

[5] Chidi, G. (2013, February 2). Confessions of a Corporate Spy. Retrieved April 22, 2015.

[6] Hewlett-Packard Company (2006). 10-K Annual Report 2006. Retrieved from SEC EDGAR website http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

[7] HPQ Interactive Stock Chart | Yahoo! Inc. Stock – Yahoo! Finance (HPQ Interactive Stock Chart | Yahoo! Inc. Stock – Yahoo! Finance)

[8] MacMillan, D., Schechner, S., & Fleisher, L. (2014, December 5). Uber Snags $41 Billion Valuation. Retrieved April 21, 2015.

[9] Smith, B. (2015, March 29). Uber’s Opposition Research [E-mail interview].

[10] Henriques, D. (2015, April 28). Investigative Reporting and Opposition Journalism [E-mail interview].

[11] Kane, D. (2015, April 2). Investigative Reporting at The Raleigh News & Observer [Telephone interview].

Max Wilhelm is a junior in the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

By Matt Kupchin

“Business is boring,” said Dan Johnson, senior finance major at TCU, who reads the Wall Street Journal daily and listens to NPR one to two times a week for business news. Johnson admitted that many of his peers lack the enthusiasm he has for staying up-to-date with the complex and perceived to be mundane topic of business and economic news.

“There isn’t an obvious side to take, like in politics where it’s democrat versus republican, good versus evil or vice versa depending on who you are,” Johnson said. “It can be a lot more difficult to read.”

This year, “Millennials” (ages 18-34) are projected to surpass Baby Boomers as the nation’s largest living generation. And while local television, which reaches about , currently remains the primary place American adults turn to for news, a clear shift is taking place in terms of how people, especially young people, are getting their news.

Whether it be concerning, sad or a mix of the two, only 53 percent of online respondents, not only millennials, in a new Pew Research Study had ever even heard of NPR. Instead, numbers from 2014 bring more evidence that news is a part of the explosion of social media and mobile devices, and it may have the opportunity to reach more people with news than ever before.

Thirty percent of U.S. adults get their news from Facebook, which isn’t incredibly surprising considering 71 percent of online adults in the country use Facebook. Half of Facebook users say they get news there even though they did not go there looking for it. And this isn’t just a millennial thing.

John Harvey, professor of economics at TCU, said he gets most of his news from Facebook, using the site to filter interesting news his way.

“I have many friends who are also economists and when one of us comes across something of interest, we post it,” Harvey said. “Their ultimate source varies widely: BBC, Wall Street Journal, The Economist, AP Wire, Reuters, etc. In that way, we collectively serve to screen news articles for each other.”

In terms of millennials, social media has an even stronger pull, as Facebook users who get their news at the highest rates are 18 to 29 year olds. 71 percent of Crowdtap survey participants, all millennials, listed social media as a top priority in their lives, engaging in it daily. 60 percent of these same millennials said they depend on social media to keep up-to-date on current global and local news.

However, what’s concerning about this new found reliance on social media, primarily Facebook, for news consumption is that recent evidence finds these consumers have very low levels of engagement with the news sites. Visitors who arrive directly at a news site typically spend over four minutes at that site, looking at more than 24 pages on average monthly. Those same users who arrive from Facebook spend about a minute and a half on that news site, looking at only four pages during that same time.

And in terms of business news coverage, Facebook is also lacking. Only 31 percent of Facebook news consumers regularly see business news on the site. This ranks last by quite a large margin in terms of topics of news seen on Facebook.

This lack of business and economic news coverage isn’t only happening on new age social media sites such as Facebook. Traditional media organizations and primarily those on television, which still reach the most Americans as previously stated, have begun to drop the ball on business coverage.

Less Coverage on TV

According to a Media Matters report, the total amount of television news coverage devoted to the economy and business related issues declined significantly across all networks during the second half of 2014.

Media Matters recorded only 475 economic segments on the three largest broadcast (ABC, CBS and NBC) and three largest cable (CNN, FOX News and MSNBC) networks from July through December, compared to 861 economic segments from January through June. CNN virtually ignored economic coverage during this period, airing only 34 recorded segments. MSNBC led the pack by dedicating 231 segments to economic news and policy debates.

And while these statistics along with many others in this report are startling, I found that the most noteworthy was that economists account for only 3.2 percent of all recorded guests during economic news coverage. Political guests and journalists make up almost the entirety. Those who could provide expert analysis, actual economists, represented only 23 of the 715 total guests in segments on the economy during the second half of the year. And apparently this is normal according to past trends.

This makes it incredibly concerning that even if more Americans start following economic news coverage, even if more young Americans start following economic news coverage, the coverage and news they will receive will merely follow the political agenda of whichever network they tune in to and not actually provide them with concrete, expert knowledge from professionals.

So where should Americans, young Americans, turn for their news? Where do they turn?

Well, when looking to digital news, a NiemanLab poll found that 54.3 percent of millennials favored Vice, Slate, Buzzfeed and similar “non-traditional” sites for their news. This seems to show how young people are changing the way news is consumed and where they prefer to consume it.

Vice Media, the global digital youth brand with an audience of 130 million viewers/readers a month, has become one of the fastest growing channels on YouTube. It’s innovative site, paired with HBO, with 60 Minutes-style investigative pieces that would often times be too risqué for the CBS mainstay, have made Vice News appealing to younger audiences.

“Our approach and the way we are trying to package what we do is radically different to what we see in terrestrial TV,” Kevin Sutcliffe, the head of news programs for Vice Media, said at the Guardian International Television Festival in August. “Vice News isn’t TV news. We are building it out of an already engaged online audience in their 20s. We are in a different space. Response to people moving away from the old fashioned forms of TV news, whether that’s news bulletins or 24-hour [rolling news] TV. We have responded to that.”

Vice is now valued at more than $2.5 billion after receiving a $500 million investment in September from A+E Networks and TCV, so it’s safe to say that this new form of media has found success.

Vice has also continued to adapt and add to their repertoire as a news provider, recently partnering with Snapchat to provide more mobile access to their stories. Snapchat’s new tool, ‘Discover,’ allows media outlets like Vice to post bite-sized content on the popular messaging app.

Snapchat currently is working with ten media partners, including CNN, ESPN and Vice who release new editions of their Discover content every 24 hours, featuring both videos and articles from the companies. A goal of these media companies is to hook a new, younger audience that doesn’t often connect with traditional media. Personally I use Snapchat’s new ‘Discover’ tool daily, and will often share videos and interesting stories I find on Vice with friends and vice versa on my mobile device.

The Mobile Trend

And mobile seems to be the most apparent future of news. S. Mitra Kalita, (right) managing editor at the Los Angeles Times and former executive editor at Quartz, a business news outlet built primarily for tablets and mobile phones, said that the mobile trend is simply how news outlets must now connect with their audience.

“Rare is the person who doesn’t have a smart phone. Our model is shareable so they discover us mostly through Facebook, Twitter, and other sites such as Reddit and LinkedIn,” Kalita said. “I think over the last few years traditional organizations gave up on younger readers in an era of bleeding and major cuts. Now they see young readers via mobile, iPads, watches or texts as their future.”

Hanna Jane Stradinger, senior entrepreneurial management major at TCU, said she gets nearly all her business and daily news from her mobile phone. For business news, she said she uses the Wall Street Journal app and their breaking news alert system, which sends her direct messages. And for daily news Stradinger said she subscribes to the Skimm, a free daily e-mail newsletter with an editorial perspective.

“The Skimm does a great job of reaching both younger audiences and audiences that wouldn’t typically read the news on a daily basis,” she said. “It gives a very easy to understand description of top news stories and provides links to read up on further details.”

This concept Stradinger brings up regarding easy to understand news seems to get back to the idea of why business and economic news doesn’t seem to attract the average young reader. Most readers, especially young readers, lack background knowledge on complex economic issues that are difficult to explain in short news stories. Professor Harvey compares it to reading sports news.

“You don’t seek out NFL news if you don’t understand football,” Harvey said. “Reading every economics article you find online isn’t very useful if you don’t have a frame of reference to interpret them. This is especially problematic when many of those authoring the articles also don’t have a firm grasp of the underlying processes.”

Harvey said this lack of understanding might not be that different for older readers, but they may have a vested interest to stay informed.

“Even if I don’t understand the stock market, if my retirement money is there, then it’s a topic of interest to me,” he said.

Kalita, however, said she believes that this idea of having a vested interest is beginning to occur within young people, who will soon become much more connected to business news.

“I think young people are actually obsessed with money in a way we haven’t seen before because they are the first generation to risk being worse off than their parents,” she said.

This responsibility of growing up in a struggling economy may force young readers to more closely follow areas of business and economic news that they never would have. Yet the only seemingly certain thing is that they will be following this news on their mobile devices, and sharing news on the go through social media like never before.

Matt Kupchin is a senior at the Bob Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University.

By Paulina Blanc

In order to survive in the current digital revolution major news entities are pushing toward digital and diversity in their coverage, while the business desk of The Dallas Morning News is confidently doing neither.

“We don’t waste our energy on what wires can cover,” said Pamela Yip, personal finance and senior/aging issues writer at the Morning News. “We focus our energies on what really matters to readers here.”

Two-thirds of its 60-person staff has been cut since its peak in 2001, yet the business desk remains steadfast in its long-standing and overarching goal: to produce the most meaningful, hyper local and analytical coverage of businesses in Dallas.

“What we cover, we cover very well. We just don’t have as many people as we used to on each beat,” said Terry Maxon, an airline and aviation reporter who has been at the Morning News for more than a quarter century. “So we have to keep re-prioritizing and rethinking how to best use our resources.”

Dennis Fulton, the business editor at the Morning News, said the paper now uses part-time staff or freelancers to cover the beats that it no longer has full-time reporters on.

“We made a plan around what our strengths in coverage needed to be and built a team around that,” Fulton said. “And what we can’t write we use wires to cover.”

Editors at the Morning News have picked their spots, or strengths, in coverage and not looked back. These spots are aviation and airline news, catering to the local older and aging population and producing insightful, analytical coverage of local businesses and the economy.

Having covered business at multiple media outlets in North Texas for over 25 years and now as a business columnists at the Morning News, Mitchell Schnurman (right) said the Morning News’ edge lies in the perspective, insight, context, and analysis that it brings to its business coverage. The Morning News refers to this strategy by an acronym, “PICA,” a throwback reference to the pica pole or the metal ruler newspapers used to measure type in column inches.

While technology has made it faster and easier to both gather and report information, Schnurman said the Morning News remains focused on giving readers what they can’t get from mere data or a press release: an informed perspective on local businesses and the economy.

“We don’t believe that breaking news by itself is a sustainable model because it’s table stakes, everybody’s got to have it today,” Schnurman said. “If there’s a deeper explanation then that’s what we think is really important and what our readers value and want.”

For instance, in his April 10, 2015, column “Is Texas Afraid of Going Green?” Schnurman not only reports that there is a proposal to reject the renewable standard of wind power in Texas but also examines and explains why he thinks the state is wrong in trying to eliminate this renewable portfolio standard for green energy.

“I’m not just saying there’s a proposal because that wouldn’t tell you a lot,” Schnurman said. “I’m giving insight into both the history of how and why its worked in the past. It’s not the kind of thing you could do off the top of your head, there’s a lot of insight from my reporting and research.”

Insightful Answers

Cheryl Hall (right), a business columnist who’s covered business at the Morning News for over 40 years, said readers are after an insightful answer as to how business and economics pertains to them.

“We are very dedicated to being meaningful and leading with our expertise,” Hall said.  “The world is very, very complicated and the general public is looking at credible media to help them find the way to truths.”

Similarly, the Morning News has persisted with its emphasis on aviation and airlines news.

This emphasis seems fitting because two of the largest airlines, American Airlines and Southwest Airlines Co., are based in the metroplex and the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport was the third-busiest U.S. airport in 2014 according to the Federal Aviation Administration.

The Morning News supplements its print airline coverage with its “Airline Biz Blog,” which is one of its two business blogs. The “Airline Biz Blog,” which was created in May 2007, offers a mix of everything pertaining to airlines while the “Biz Beat Blog” is dedicated to local breaking business news.

Maxon said the blog gets about 400,00 page views a month.

“Print is mostly for North Texas but on the Internet everyone is next door,” Maxon said. “So there’s a lot more readership from across the country.”

Maxon said the blog is to thank for making the Morning News the sole media outlet to break that American Airlines was going to file for bankruptcy in November 2011. He said a blog reader who was also a grounds worker at American emailed him to say that he had heard from headquarters that there was going to be a “big event” the next day at American.

“This was my biggest scoop, and it wouldn’t have happened without the blog,” Maxon said.

The business department at Morning News has also chosen to cater to its core audience: older readers who want a print product.

Yip said the Morning News serves two distinct audiences: younger online readers and older print readers.

Fulton said the majority of the paper’s revenue is still generated from its print newspaper and that juggling coverage to best serve both audiences is difficult.

“Writing for both audiences is tough and stretches us thinner than you would think,” Fulton said.

Schnurman said the Morning News is chiefly committed to producing a print newspaper that’s worth paying for.

“If they want a print product, then we are going to give them a good print product,” Schnurman said. “We are willingly to give them a bigger news hole and more substantial report.”

Catering to the Core Audience

The business desk even staffs a full time writer, Yip, who equally splits her coverage between personal finance and aging/senior issues.

Fulton (right) said although it’s not common for news outlets to have a beat that revolves around retirement, Yip’s coverage is important to catering to the paper’s core audience.

“Our print audience is ready to retire or already has retired and is thinking more about their money than our younger web audience,” Fulton said.

Recognizing its target market and gearing its coverage to best serve these consumers has made the Morning News’ business coverage consistently successful.

“We have a lot of heft and depth over competitors,” Fulton said. “We are the best in Dallas and the metroplex.”

But this in-depth and niche approach to covering business is just one piece of the puzzle to creating a news outlet that can endure in the digital revolution.

The Morning News’ focus on its core audience may help it retain its current readers, but may also mean that it will fail to capture important growing Texas and national demographics: millennials and minorities.

There’s been an undeniable advent and continued popularity of online and social media as a means for consumers to gather news.

On average Americans follow the news using four different devices or technologies, according to a 2014 report by the American Press Institute.

Furthermore, 59 percent of millennials get their news from the Internet according to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation.

While most of the department’s reporters are on Twitter and Facebook, Fulton said he doesn’t require all of his writers to have it.

“I think we need to bring everyone up to speed and have more basic knowledge and understanding of digital on the staff,” Fulton said.

Additionally, its online content is predominately text. Technology has made it possible and easy to create graphs and videos that can help readers better understand business news.

Maxon said he focuses on “getting more story in” than on creating “flashy” graphics for his stories.

Hall agreed; she said she is more concerned with having strength in the textual content of her columns more than incorporating graphics to supplement her work.

“There’s plenty of room for improvement to make my stories more interactive, but I’m 63 years old; I’m going to let someone else figure that out,” Hall said.

Additionally, Fulton also noted a lack of diversity in both the ages and the races of the staff in the business department. He said the staff in the business department is the most senior of any department at the paper.

“It’s good because we have a lot of deep knowledge about Dallas business and how things work but we don’t have the perspective that younger faces would bring,” Fulton said.

Moreover, there are only two women, one of which is the only minority, who cover business full-time for the Morning News.

In having such uniform demographics among its staff, the Morning News may be ignoring a large segment of its readership.

This is because among states, Texas has the second highest population of immigrants, according to a 2014 report by the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, with 60 percent of the state’s immigrants being from Mexico.

Specifically, the Dallas-Fort Worth area has the second highest foreign-born population share in the state (18 percent), according to the same report.

Fulton said he knows the value of diversity in the newsroom and that the diversity of his staff isn’t as good as it used to be.

“We lost a lost a lot of good minority reporters that I wasn’t able to replace,” Fulton said. “You have to hire the best candidates when people apply. You can consider diversity but you must hire the best person.”

Fulton said the writers at the business desk will eventually retire or leave and that the Morning News’ will take age and racial diversity into consideration when that turnover occurs.

The newspaper industry is collectively working toward adapting to digital and better modeling the ever-increasing melting pot that is our American society.

While the business desk of the Morning News has room to improve in these facets, its intelligibly narrowed approach to coverage is successful in providing analytical and well-written business stories to Dallasites and its audience on the Internet.

Hall said she doesn’t know what the future ultimately holds for the Morning News or any newspaper. Though she said she is hopeful for the future of the Morning News because everyday she walks into work she’s reminded of the paper’s motto which is displayed in the lobby.

“It says ‘build the news upon the rock of truth and righteousness,’” Hall said. “Every time I see it I think to myself ‘Yeah, we still actually believe that here.’”

Paulina Blanc is a senior at the Schieffer School of Journalism at Texas Christian University.

By Corinne Jurney

Historically committed to a spirit of entrepreneurial capitalism, Forbes Media is taking a page out of its own book–or more aptly now, from its own website. And it’s paying off in a big way.

Forbes Media published its first magazine 98 years ago, and was under the control of the Forbes family for nearly a century. The reign of the Forbes family ended with the sale of a majority stake in the company to a group of Asian investors.

A reported sum of $475 million, bought Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media Investments (IWM) majority ownership of the business media giant last July. Anchored by Integrated Asset Management, an investment firm that specializes in technology and telecommunications investments, the major investors are Tak Cheung Yam and Wayne Hsieh. The sale fortified Forbes’ brand in China, where it sells its other flagship magazine, Forbes Asia and has a Chinese language website. The Forbes family retained an estimated 20-percent stake in the media company during the sale.

New models

Forbes has largely been spared many of the revenue problems crippling the traditional media industry due to Chief Product Officer Lewis D’Vorkin’s innovative vision and leadership. D’Vorkin embodies the entrepreneurial spirit Forbes is known for lauding, by developing and implementing new business models for advertising, content-creation and labor. D’Vorkin pioneered a new advertising frontier and is credited with inventing the term “native advertising,” formerly known as content marketing.

Traditionally, a chief product officer is not the person charged with determining the direction of a media company, but D’Vorkin’s position at Forbes is an exception.

“As far as my title and role, I’m the only one that I’m aware of who has the kind of title and role in the world of traditional media,” said D’Vorkin. “It’s definitely unusual. What it does for our company, and has for last five years, is really stress the fact that journalism is placed in context of products.”

D’Vorkin said journalists have been hesitant to adopt the mindset that the product that a story is placed in is just as important as the story itself. But, the product is what advertisers spend money to be in, he said.

“Continuous new product development has changed the makeup of staff, the culture of the organization and has set us apart from our traditional competitors in business category,” said D’Vorkin.

The magazine industry fits the definition of perfect competition, said Penny Abernathy, Knight Chair in Journalism and Media Economics. She said the business and finance segment is very attractive, which means it could attract new entrants, which are totally digital.

“In that state, the only barrier to entry into a market is the loyalty of your customers,” she said.

As of September 2014, Forbes’ online operations made up 65 percent of total advertising revenue and digital revenue was growing at 20 percent.

Advertisers in the front seat

Through Forbes’ integrated advertising platform, BrandVoice, businesses have joined the content-creating party, both in print and online. Launched in 2010, BrandVoice allows businesses to publish content under the same format used by staff writers and contributors. This model makes the transition between reading editorial and sponsored content, nearly seamless and makes the ad experience less disruptive. In print, companies can purchase space next to contextually-relevant editorial content, positioned to appear as an extension of the article or story. On the website, advertisers receive their own home pages, where they can publish columns, articles and stories of interest to their target audiences.

Native advertising is D’Vorkin’s solution to the declining number of advertising dollars being spent in magazines. D’Vorkin defines the term in an April editorial as “advertisers telling stories related to what they do without slavishly resorting to sales speak.” The CPO has continually used his editorial space in print and on his digital home page to defend Forbes’ integration of native advertising and laud its value.

“Marketers have insights and understand their business and have things to say and want to connect with an audience,” said D’Vorkin.

Some of Forbes’ reporters and editors were skeptical when the company launched BrandVoice, but D’Vorkin said he assured them then that their jobs wouldn’t change and this has proven true.

“You’re going to report, make phone calls, write, investigate–you’re going to do what you’ve been doing. Online and in the magazine, we’ll have space for advertisers to kind of do the same and it will be clearly labeled that it’s by you or that it’s by marketers,” he said

D’Vorkin said BrandVoice has allowed Forbes to expand its staff, which is unusual in today’s media business. D’Vorkin oversees about 130 people in the editorial and product departments.

Winning with native

Cashing in as 30 percent of Forbes’ advertising revenue, BrandVoice has been a staggering success for the company’s bottom line. The platform has continued to evolve. It launched home pages for companies to publish on, last year. This year, it introduced Pulse, an interactive visual program advertisers can utilize to further engage audiences. Toyota, which also has a BrandVoice home page, is the first adopter of Pulse.

Other publications have taken notice of Forbes success and have followed suit. Both the Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post, recently hired former Forbes standouts to learn the D’Vorkin way. Forbes’ main competitors, Bloomberg Businessweek and Fortune, have also begun investing in native advertising. Business Insider Intelligence estimates spending on native ads this year will reach $7.9 billion and will grow to $21 billion by 2018.

Since overhauling Forbes’ advertising and content platforms, unique visitors to the site’s business channel increased 393 percent, from 2.9 million to 14.3 million, Dvorkin told a conference audience in 2014.

Online, more than 6,000 BrandVoice posts have been published. BrandVoice has garnered more traction in certain industries, including Business and Technology, where between 20 percent and 25 percent of the main landing pages are sponsored, respectively. Notable companies utilizing the homepage feature include SunGard Availability Services, CenturyLink and NetApp. The Lifestyle and Leadership sections each have only one sponsored home page.

“The way I see it, there are two levers, hot and cold, in a bathtub: content and advertising,” said Brad Thomas, editor of Forbes Real Estate Investor. “The most successful companies have the right combination coming out of the spigot. And I think Forbes has that.”

Pay to play

Pennsylvania-based SunGardAS is an information services company that utilizes Forbes’ BrandVoice and the home page feature.

Joe Clancy, digital marketing manager at SunGard, said BrandVoice gives his company the opportunity to focus on delivering a consistent message to a wide audience. The only drawback lies in having to sacrifice design and creativity, which advertisers have traditionally relied on.

“Forbes is incredibly powerful,” Clancy said in an e-mail. He said Forbes’ 5 million Twitter followers and the BrandVoice platform allows SunGard’s content to gain page rank traction with targeted keywords.

“For example, if we wanted to write a piece around Disaster Recovery Planning, once it was launched on Forbes BV it would immediately show up on Google’s News Tab (on page one),” said Clancy.

Clancy said SunGard’s strategy with native advertising is to tell readers what the company does without coming off as too ‘sales-centric.’ Clancy said SunGard also wants readers to know “that we are keenly aware of current events and issues that are largely unrelated to our business,” including lifestyle and general workplace commentary. He the company has not yet pinpointed a way to quantify its results with BrandVoice.

“We have witnessed a great deal of page views and exposure for our business,” said Clancy. “We are still struggling with how best to measure it from an ROI perspective, but there is no question the tool puts our brand out in front of more people every day.”

Surprises abound in print

D’Vorkin said his initial vision for BrandVoice was primarily digital, but demand for space in print has surged. Forbes has run 50 two-column BrandVoice stories in print, “all clearly labeled,” according to D’Vorkin in an April editorial.

Forbes’ February issue might have baffled readers, who opened the front cover to find yet another cover. The second cover was sponsored wholly by AT&T, which also sponsored a two-page story in the popular “Top 30 Under 30” issue. D’Vorkin said the company received no pushback from readers in response to the dual cover. The magazine’s list issues are particularly attractive to advertisers and are an area for growth, he said.

Blurred lines

With the increasing popularity of BrandVoice among advertisers, Forbes is faced with maintaining the journalistic prestige of its masthead.

Lucia Moses of DigiDay wrote that “by letting advertisers post content produced for them by other publishers, there’s the possibility that they’ll dilute their message to the Forbes readership. The ecumenical approach to native also points to just how blurry the lines between advertiser, publisher and ad content creator have become.”

Thomas, also a Forbes contributor, said he does not think publishing his content alongside native advertising diminishes his, or Forbes’ brand. He said Forbes’ content has consistently remained high-quality throughout the changes in the company.

“I keep looking for signs that the quality could diminish, but I think it starts at the top with Lewis,” said Thomas. “When you have someone at the top with the same aspirations for quality, it trickles down.”

Speaking for yourself

The social journalism platform boasts an army of more than 1,000 contributors who publish articles on the website, covering a vast array of topics. One-third of these authors are freelance journalists, but the remaining contributors are experts, entrepreneurs, business professionals, academics and authors. Allowing these people to publish under Forbes’ brand gives them credibility and space to demonstrate their knowledge.

Inevitably, conflicts of interest pervade this model. Similar to journalists promoting their intangible brands, these contributors often use Forbes’ platform to advertise tangible brands, including, financial services, books and trusts. Forbes’ niche newsletters are written by professionals, who share insights with readers, demonstrating their prowess in their respective industries and thus promoting their own funds or companies. The contributors are meticulously vetted, said Thomas, who went through a two-year process to be approved as a Forbes contributor.

Thomas, who writes Forbes’ biannual commercial real estate investment newsletter, is an investor in this sector and is planning to launch or co-invest in an ETF. He is also writing a book about Donald Trump’s empire. Thomas’ newsletter dispenses advice for investing in REIT and an investor looking to enter this market, would be likely to consider investing with a fund or trust Thomas is affiliated with. His role also gives him a channel through which to promote his book when it’s published.

Define the line

The American Society of Magazine Editors released new guidelines for native advertising in 2015:

ASME also recommends that native advertising on websites and in social media should be clearly labeled as advertising by the use of terms such as “Sponsor Content” or “Paid Post” and visually distinguished from editorial content and that collections of sponsored links should be clearly labeled as advertising and visually separated from editorial content.

On websites populated by multiple sources of content, including user-generated content, aggregated content and marketer-provided content, editors and publishers must take special care to distinguish between editorial content and advertising.

D’Vorkin’s outlined vision jibes with these guidelines and emphasizes that all native advertising in Forbes is indicated as such.

“The key is that it needs to be clearly labeled and very transparent to the audience that the content comes from an advertiser or marketer,” said D’Vorkin.

However, based on these guidelines, ASME might not look favorably upon Forbes’ decision to sell a sponsored second cover, labeled with an inconspicuous “BrandVoice by AT&T” banner. To understand this is sponsored content, readers have to be familiar with BrandVoice and what it means. This sponsorship might not be immediately clear to the average reader, who would require a more blatant “Sponsor Content” or “Paid Post” citation.

Readers must be vigilant in reading the magazine and website, scanning each byline for a sponsorship tag.

A 2012 study by Contently found that two-thirds of survey respondents said they felt deceived when they realized an article was sponsored.

Robby Wiggins, a senior in UNC’s Kenan-Flagler Business School regularly visits Forbes’ website and said he’s often unsure whose opinions he’s reading.

“I think allowing companies to publish on the site is a slippery slope and greatly risks confusing and alienating readers,“ said Wiggins. “When I read sponsored content, regardless of however much the sponsoring agency takes liberty with changing a certain angle, I immediately doubt the credibility of the source.”

Looking forward

Forbes continues to explore new frontiers of native advertising and anticipates interest among advertisers in the Pulse platform. D’Vorkin said he expects to see native advertising grow both at Forbes and in the larger media industry.

“Companies are increasingly starting their own corporate newsrooms to publish content,” said D’Vorkin. “The traditional newsroom as we know it, is showing up everywhere and we’re going to see more as years unfold.”

Thomas said he thinks Forbes has a sustainable model due to its balance of editorial and advertising, and the fact that its content has not diminished at the expense of increased native advertising.

“Forbes is a survivor,” said Thomas.

Corinne Jurney is a senior at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

By Jake Barach

Three investing experts’ opinions, a 74.8 percent climb, a 62.7 percent drop, multiple double-digit percentage intraday swings, several hundred PowerPoint slides and two and a half years, and Herbalife Ltd.’s shares currently trade less than 1 percent below their price two weeks before Bill Ackman began his public assault on the nutritional supplement company in 2012.

On Dec. 20, 2012, Ackman, a hedge fund manager at Pershing Square Capital Management LP, made public the details of his massive short on shares of Herbalife, sending prices down 9.7 percent on the day and 30.2 percent across four trading sessions. Within two months, Dan Loeb, founder of Third Point LLC, and Carl Icahn, founder of Icahn Enterprises LP, staked their bets on the long side of Herbalife shares. Since then, the three have written investor letters and made countless media appearances in order to defend their stance on the issue. Ackman’s failure to provide the “smoking gun” for Herbalife’s impropriety during his second, three-hour, widely-covered broadcast led to an 18 percent rise in the stock’s share price as he spoke July 22, 2014.

Though the average investor may not be sure who’s right in this situation, the swings in share prices indicate that they are clearly paying attention. The words and dollars of these three men have yet to bring to light the truth behind the company’s structural integrity and financial viability. Still, the media eye rests firmly upon them and their fellow elite investors in an effort to provide its audience with the coverage it desires, but not necessarily the coverage it needs.

“People shouldn’t be looking for reasonable financial advice for free on the Internet or their television. It’s simply kind of a ludicrous expectation,” said Jeff Macke, the founder of Macke Asset Management LLC. “But, selling ice cream is always going to be a better business than selling kale.”

The Herbalife case may be the sweetest ice cream to go on sale in recent years. In 2013, 13.8 percent of families held stocks among their assets and 94.5 percent held some form of financial asset, according to a Federal Reserve Board bulletin from September 2014. The average investor with a stake in equities and fixed-income mutual funds has earned a 1.9 percent annualized return during the past 30 years, writes Sean Hanlon of Forbes.

For this reason, it should be no surprise that investment “gurus” like Icahn, Loeb, Ackman, Leon Cooperman and Warren Buffett, who have amassed immense wealth through their shrewd and calculated stock picks, garner investor admiration. To see three of these titans go after one another, with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line, is as entertaining of an active management story as the media is going to get. There’s a highlight reel-esque New York Times timeline to prove it. But, boiling down investing into an easily digestible, “me versus you” scenario can undervalue the process that goes into assigning value to a stock.

Supply vs. Demand

Given the money at stake in, and the complexity of, the financial markets, people crave information, particularly seemingly lucrative information. Supply is valuable among this massive demand, but it is also a highly competitive space, said Macke. As with any business in search of financial success, outlets such as Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal, Fox Business Network and CNBC seek to provide customers with what they want. In a world dominated by financial jargon and massive institutions, recognizable, successful names often fit viewers’ tastes, and outlets are quick to comply and place these investors on a pedestal. This, however, may do more harm than good for the consumer.

Among this obsession with active management, it can become easy for the average investor to be convinced that they can and should be picking their own stocks, said Barry Ritholtz, (right) the founder of Ritholtz Wealth Management and a Bloomberg View columnist. This assumption comes despite the fact that the S&P 500 climbed 11.39 percent in 2014, and only 30 of the funds named on Bloomberg’s list of 100 top-performing large hedge funds generated a greater return on the year. Ackman’s Pershing Square International, which generated a 32.8 percent return, stands atop the list.

“Even if the investor can mimic what the pros are doing, so what?” said Ritholtz. “The guy who buys an index and puts it away is ultimately going to have lower cost, lower taxes and better performance. The only thing is, they have less to talk about at a barbeque or a cocktail party.”

Though outlets benefit financially from providing viewers access to the stars of the investing world, the relationship between the two is far from one sided. Stock picks, no matter how insightful, don’t pay off successfully unless other investors agree with the your position. As a result, most people with large stakes in the market want their voice heard, said Josh Brown, CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management and author of “Clash of the Financial Pundits: How the Media Influences Your Investment Decisions for Better or Worse.” In the age of constant news cycles, this can cause confusion for the everyday investor.

“There’s a tremendous amount of noise and very little signal,” said Ritholtz. “You have to sift through all that noise to get through to the signal underneath.”

While the typical fund manager with an unrecognized name may court media attention and get a quote placed every so often, the outlets are clamoring for quotes from people like Icahn and Ackman, said Macke. This, in turn, provides these investors with a megaphone through which to convey their opinions.

What may, in fact, just be a particularly loud “noise” can easily be attributed as signal even in the face of limited evidence. In August 2013, for example, Icahn tweeted about his position in Apple Inc. and the notion that it was particularly undervalued. In 140 characters or less, and with the aid of a wealth of media coverage, Icahn helped shares of Apple stock rise in value by nearly 5 percent on the day.

Given his access to executives, his experience on company boards and his investing pedigree, it wouldn’t be shocking if Icahn’s statement was correct. Yet, whereas an everyday, skilled investor might see Apple as undervalued, purchase shares and then reap rewards as future investors come to a similar conclusion later on, Icahn is able to skip this process thanks to the coverage he receives and the attention he commands. He can generate profit nearly instantaneously. This influence on the markets is concerning, particularly when considering certain aspects of human nature that come into play in investing.

“There are a lot of examples throughout history where the public wants to believe that somebody can give them certainty about the future,” said Brown. “We put the guy who was just right about something on the pedestal just about every time. We almost never learn.”

The subscription to this hot-hand fallacy means that someone such as Icahn, who is often “right” simply as a consequence of having his past and his ideas becoming highly visible, is unlikely to relinquish his influence. Viewer confidence in his ability to pick stocks perpetuates the need to cover him among outlets. This coverage sways investor sentiment, generates profit for Icahn, has investors clinging to his every word and keeps the cycle going.

Tracking Billionaires

Despite the criticisms, the business world possesses a massive influence on our everyday lives. Forbes’ 2014 list of billionaires included the names of 1,645 people that have the rare, and enviable, honor of requiring at least 10 digits to describe their wealth. At Forbes, the coverage of individuals is largely limited to their impressive number and a short blurb about how it grew so large. At Bloomberg Billionaires, Peter Newcomb, an editor on the desk, and his team work to piece together the math and the stories behind the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest people.

“The way we look at it, by covering these guys, you’re covering the ultimate movers and shakers of the global economy. These guys have their hands on every aspect of the economy, whether it’s the international markets, the clothes you wear or the food you eat,” said Newcomb. “It’s hard to leave your house and go about your day without half a dozen billionaires’ fortunes getting in your way.”

The value in Bloomberg Billionaires differs significantly for those that pay upwards of $20,000 a year for a Bloomberg terminal and those who peruse the website for free, said Newcomb. The terminal users, who tend to be deeply engaged with the financial markets, turn to the desk’s work to understand how the world’s wealthiest are deploying their capital and steering their investments, he said. On the site, however, the interest is much more on par with financial porn, as readers seek an inside look at the lifestyles of the fabulously wealthy.

Some, like David Geffen, who embarked on his path to riches as the co-founder of Asylum Records, will happily speak on background and provide guidance as to how they’re investing, said Newcomb. Donald Trump, on the other hand, is Newcomb’s go-to example for someone who has a tendency to be too helpful and embellish his holdings. Still, the issue of self-promotion on the part of the billionaires resonates. Despite the range of cooperation, there is one consistency that invokes similar concerns as those regarding investment “gurus.”

“Most don’t really want to cooperate on reporting their wealth because they’re not that interested in that,” said Newcomb. “They are interested in their deal making. So, if you’re really covering their business, that’s something they’re more inclined to cooperate with.”

No Advantage

Ultimately, it’s difficult to tell how big of an impact the financial media and its coverage of investment gurus has on the ways in which its consumers invest. A general and costly misconception about the analyst reports, stories and charts that investors “research,” however, is that they can help someone vet which stocks are worth buying, said Ritholtz. The semi-strong form of the efficient-market hypothesis suggests that share prices incorporate and reflect all relevant, publicly available information.

“Unless you’re getting market moving news before everyone else, what is the advantage of reading something that’s in Barron’s, the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times if the rest of the investing world is acting on it?” said Ritholtz. “Whatever strategic benefit there is to gain from this information is lost in the fact that everyone has access to it.”

Even if investors attempt to consume financial media as a means of gauging the economic environment, rather than handpicking stocks, the impact of the recency effect, or the tendency to focus only on the most recent data points, on writers and financial media consumers can be detrimental to this effort. Markets need to be understood across time, thus analysis of a stream of data points, not a singular mark, is necessary to come to meaningful conclusions, said Ritholtz.

“A couple of years ago, CNBC used to have a clock countdown to non-farm payrolls. I don’t remember if it was tenths of a second or hundredths of a second, but it was just absurd,” said Ritholtz. “It isn’t Usain Bolt. It’s non-farm payroll, and it’s going to be adjusted next month anyway.”

This disdain for the sound bite genre led Ritholtz to create “Masters of Business,” a podcast in which he sits down for an hour with players across various industries. Instead of discussing stock picks, however, the discussions tend toward the guests’ varied expertise. Brad Katsuyama, the CEO of the IEX dark pool and protagonist of Michael Lewis’ “Flash Boys,” discussed dark pools and high frequency trading. Bobby Flay spoke on the business of the Food Network. Even here, there is some self-promotion, though it may come with a more educational tilt. This format is synchronous with Ritholtz’s belief that an investor must have a diversified set of expertise in order to be effective, but, for better or for worse, it is not conducive with the direction media is going in, said Macke.

“If you have the luxury of having a longer cycle and viewers that want to pay attention to you for 60 minutes, and you’re happy with that niche, that’s fine,” said Macke. “For the people that are craving an audience, we’re going to a three minute sound bite type of future, and you better embrace it and figure out how to be relevant in that genre.”

Though there may be flaws in financial media and the ways in which people consume it, there is no denying that it adheres to supply and demand economics, said Macke. The average investor is putting his or her money at substantial risk in an environment that is hard to fully comprehend and even harder to predict. The constant stream of speculation, data and coverage may not be worthy for investment advice, but it certainly plays a major role in comforting investors and enabling them to understand the ins and outs of the corporate and financial worlds. The business media outlets capitalize on this need, and the glut of competition has demanded that they continue to adapt the way in which they do so.

Big time investors may command more control and attention within the markets than they should as a result of the way business media’s relationship with its consumers has developed, but it’s only natural. If you’re a competitor, and everyone invested in the stock markets is to some extent, you pay attention to those that compete best.

Jake Barach is a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill studying business journalism. He interned at Bloomberg News in the summer of 2013.

By Meg Garner

Reporters laugh, joking back and forth about something they have seen or read. They are not just coworkers but friends dedicated to telling and sharing the news in a way that is both spirited and serious.

It does not seem to faze these reporters that their work could be shared across the Internet that day with millions of readers tuning in to see, click and share, but then going viral is nothing new for a BuzzFeed reporter.

Since its inception in 2006, BuzzFeed has dedicated its team to a model of tracking viral content and producing stories that people want to share, so it makes sense that the site’s reporters are familiar with writing attention-grabbing pieces.

And after two years BuzzFeed’s business desk has proven itself to be no exception to this model.

WTF: BuzzFeed and business?!?

A large majority would hedge their bets by saying readers going to BuzzFeed to find out which Disney ride they are are probably not interested in JPMorgan’s latest earnings. That same majority might also say business news is boring.

So why mix something as boring and old-fashioned as business news with the young, hip, fast-paced reputation of BuzzFeed?

The answer really is simple.

What this great majority continually gets wrong is that business news can be both. They do not recognize that a business story can be engaging solely on how the writer presents it.

For this reason, the business reporters at BuzzFeed are encouraged to do just that, fill their stories with solid, compelling business reporting with a bit of uniqueness thrown in. Furthermore, they are told not to just tell the day’s stories, but tell them in a way that differs from everyone else’s coverage.

And to BuzzFeed editor in chief that is the not-so-secret secret to the business section’s success.

“We’ve hired great, ambitious reporters, and always tried to tell original stories rather than to chase the (giant) crowd or to be all things to all people,” Smith wrote in an email.

This sentiment was reiterated by business editor who said the flexibility of BuzzFeed allows his writers to focus on only the stories they feel matter and leave other sites, like The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, to fill in the holes.

“With BuzzFeed, our distribution method primarily is social, and we see social as this foundational thing, so we’re not under the assumption that people are coming to BuzzFeed.com or to the BuzzFeed business page to see all the business news that matters at any given moment,” Gara said. “We don’t think we’re playing at their game, and we’re not trying to play at that game.”

“We know there are places that are going to be better than us with a full page of every single news headline, and what we want to have are individual stories that are compelling enough that people want to share them and will pass them around.”

And it seems to be working.

For instance, a January story by , who covers the business of education, about how college students can access personal admission files at their college went viral with over 800,000 views. Not only did Hensley-Clancy break news with this story, beating the New York Times to it a few hours, but she also wrote a business story that attracted thousands of people’s attention.

But Hensley-Clancy said while going viral is exciting, to her it is more important that she continues to dive into her beat and gain the respect of her consistent readers.

“Well, I’m not sure we’re necessarily trying to appeal to the ‘average’ BuzzFeed reader,” she said. “Some of our stories are, but a lot of them are written for a more niche, specific audience.”

“When I write a story about an education company, I don’t expect it to go viral; I write it for the few thousand people that it will matter to, and to gain respect on my beat.”

But getting people to take a BuzzFeed seriously in terms of its news coverage was not always easy, and for one reporter seeing the team’s credibility grow has been the most fulfilling part of working for BuzzFeed.

left her job at Bloomberg to cover retail for BuzzFeed in 2013 when the desk was first beginning. At the time she wrote she was “extremely attracted to the opportunity to help create a new platform for business journalism, write content that will reach more viewers + consumers (especially those under 35) and, I hope, make a real impact.”

Maheshwari said the initial year of reporting for the website was difficult because few understood what it meant for BuzzFeed to cover business news.

“There was fear that it was going to be more of a Gawker-type of publication that aggregates and comments and isn’t really rooted in fact, and so I think we had to prove ourselves in the beginning but now that part is sort of over and now we can do more reporting,” Maheshwari said. “We don’t have to worry about that quite so much anymore.”

Maheshwari has appeared on a variety of news shows shedding light on the retail industry, which can only help to promote the legitimacy and credibility of the business desk’s reporting.

Comparing her job to the one she had at Bloomberg, Maheshwari said there is more freedom with BuzzFeed in terms of what she can cover and how she can format her stories.

Gara said producing content in different formats is what makes BuzzFeed business stand out from its competitors and what makes it accessible to so many audiences.

“One of the good things about BuzzFeed is that we are very flexible and we can write in a lot of different formats if we want,” he said. “If we want we can do a 2,000-word feature, if we want we can do a 500 word quick news story, if we want we can do a list with charts and graphics with a few headlines in between them explaining what happened in earnings results and stuff like that, but I think the thing that’s important with that is knowing when at times to do each of those.”

“I feel like if there is a really complicated issue out there, especially with financial markets like with currencies or interest rates or the central banks, it’s not talking down to your readers to say here’s the five most interesting things one step at a time.”

OMG: What’s it like to be a BuzzFeed business reporter?

Surprisingly, or unsurprisingly, working for BuzzFeed according to its staffers is basically the same as working for any media outlet, except they get more snacks.

Going over his daily routine and duties, Gara said they are pretty similar to what one would expect of any desk editor.

“We’re based in New York so we’re in the same area, and I’ll physically walk around and see what everybody has going on and also talk to them about what I’ve been seeing in the news, what I’ve read that morning or what I think is interesting,” he said.

“Then we talk a little about what they’ve been seeing, and we’ll sometimes think maybe we should do something based on what we’ve been seeing and what is out there that day and what is happening. “

From discussing that day’s stories to editing pieces for accuracy and tone, Gara said the only notable difference between his job and any other editor position at another news agency is that he spends a ton of time on social networking sites publicizing his writer’s work and searching for trends.

“That’s one of the things about BuzzFeed is that we are much more interested in trending stories like through social channels, so a big part of that is just pushing our stories out to those areas like Twitter and Facebook,” he said.

“I stay on Twitter all day long looking at headlines and looking at the conversation that’s going on around the stories we cover and seeing if that chatter is leading somewhere we should be writing about.”

Gara said he pushes his writers to focus on the most unique elements of their stories and not get bogged down by frivolous information.

“I think when you’re a reporter quite often you end up taking a story in ten different directions and throwing in the whole kitchen sink because you become obsessed with the story you’re writing,” he said. “And I think as an editor you’re kind of the regular person reading it in a lot of ways because you’re the first person to see it, and when you read the story it’s a lot easier to identify what’s compelling about it and what’s interesting and new along with what’s unique and what pushes this story forward.”

“Quite often focusing on that and distilling a story down to its most compelling, interesting and unique elements is the most general thing that I spend the most time telling reporters to do.”

And after the final copy is published online that is when Gara steps up to publicize the work across social networks.

WIN: What’s the future of BuzzFeed business?

In a recent interview, VentureBeat editor in chief said the journalism industry has to adapt to social media because that is where readers are now and where they will continue to go.

“It’s probably a student that will be able to figure out how to use for journalism,” Tweney said. “It’s not going to be me because I am too busy editing posts for VentureBeat, but [a student] is going to figure out how to make a news channel out of a messaging app.”

While Tweney’s assumption is correct, readers will not have to wait too long for news made directly for social media because BuzzFeed is already doing it.

“We have a team at BuzzFeed called BFF (apply here) that’s like a new division of the company almost, who’s whole thing is to produce context sort of natively on other people’s platforms, like making stuff directly for Instagram, Snap Chat or Vine,” Gara said. “It never goes on our website. It just goes there first and only there.”

Gara said he hopes his team can figure out a way to tap into this model whether it is by posting graphics directly to Facebook or Instagram or coming up with push notifications for the company’s new app.

He also added that given BuzzFeed’s immense video operation, which averages almost one billion views a month, he hopes to find a way to create more business stories with video components.

This video alone received over 8.1 million views:

“Our video team now pulls in regularly a billion video views a month, and I don’t even know how to think about that number,” he said. “We would get a ten million viewer post on the text or list or news side a dozen times a year, and they are getting it daily.”

“I’d love to think about how to start getting business type stuff in a format that works for video.”

As far as expanding the business desk in terms of numbers, Gara hired two reporters, and , in April 2015.

Wong was hired to cover the food industry, having covered it previously for Bloomberg Businessweek. Some of her highlights include: Chipotle: The Definitive Oral History and There’s No Such Thing As Nacho Cheese.

“At BuzzFeed she will be covering the biggest names in the food business, and how they are responding to America’s fast-changing eating habits,” Gara said in an announcement to staffers. “Central to this will be the declining fortunes of some of the country’s biggest and most iconic companies, like McDonald’s and Coca Cola, and the rise of a new generation of food giants.”

Lewis will head up BuzzFeed’s coverage of labor, which Gara said he thinks is a hugely undercovered beat. She graduated from Yale in 2013 and previously interned for the New York Observer and the Wall Street Journal. Lewis also worked as a staff reporter for the New Haven Independent.

“The changing face of the labor market is one of the biggest and most consequential stories in America today, and what happens to American workers in the coming years will be a central story for the economy, politics and culture,” Gara said in an announcement to staffers.

He also said they recently moved a staffer over to cover the hospitality industry, which is an area he sees with lots of potential.

But Gara did note that while he would like to have reporters covering every beat possible, he understands there are some limitations, especially since he is the only editor.

“Moving forward one of the areas I’m really interested in, and we will have hire someone and probably many people in the long run but we don’t want to overrun ourselves now just because it’s a small team with only one editor, is the way that companies use their power to influence regulation and public policy, ranging from corporate lobbies in D.C. to kind of industry specific stuff, like how the energy industry influences that surrounding debate around climate change and renewable energy,” he said.

Hensley-Clancy agreed with Gara saying that expanding into more narrow niches in terms of coverage will help to give BuzzFeed business a powerful voice in its own industry.

“I see us becoming even more respected in our beats, and hopefully becoming a source for more scoops and exclusives as people come to know and respect us,” she said. “I have huge faith in Tom Gara — I think he’s the absolute best person for the job.”

So as Gara makes his morning rounds, chatting to his team about what he read that morning he is not as concerned about the future, but rather the present and how they can work together to create original content that is witty, colorful and informative.

“We have on our job app ‘no haters,’ which sounds funny and it’s a funny tagline that people make fun of, but it really is such an identifiable, tangible thing you feel every day,” he said. “It has such a collaborative environment that people are really happy to be around each other and really like each other on a general level and value humor and that sort of stuff.”

“It’s such a great team to be a part of.”

Meg Garner is a business journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill.

By Maddy Will

Sam Walton, who founded the largest company in the history of the world, devotes the very first pages of his autobiography to his distrust of the press.

The relationship between companies and the business journalists who cover them has always been somewhat contentious. Tight-lipped executives deliberate over how much information to disclose to the reporters who are digging to expose any wrongdoings or financial mishaps. When journalists up the ante and decide to write a book about a company, relationships can become even tenser.

Many companies decline to cooperate altogether, forcing journalists to obtain information in other ways. Other companies grant limited access, with a list of stipulations attached. When companies do cooperate, journalists have to balance their input with writing the truth.

“I think that cooperation is a hard thing,” said Yukari Iwatani Kane, author of the recent book “Haunted Empire: Apple after Steve Jobs.” “A book is really long, you only have so much control, and it’s risky for companies. As a writer, it’s risky as well — you absolutely want a company’s cooperation, if they’re going to give it to you, the answer is always yes. But if you end up with the company’s line, it’s not going to be an interesting book.”

“Some of the best journalism has been without the company’s cooperation,” she said. “As a journalist, that’s what everyone aspires to — to tell the truth about something that’s not apparent.”

Writing an unbiased truth

“,” which was published this March, examines Apple post-Steve Jobs and the challenges his successor Tim Cook faces at the company’s helm.

“It’s a story about what happened to an empire when it loses its emperor,” said Kane, who was once an Apple beat reporter for the Wall Street Journal.

Soon after it was published, Cook decried the book as “nonsense,” saying, “It fails to capture Apple, Steve, or anyone else in the company.”

But Apple refused to cooperate with Kane the entire time she was writing the book — something she said was not much different from when she was a beat reporter at the Journal. When it was time to fact-check, she initially ran two questions by the company to test the waters: what kind of tree is in front of Apple’s main building, cherry or apple? And what did Yo-Yo Ma play at Steve Jobs’ memorial service?

Apple declined to answer the second question. Officials said they would get back to Kane on the first question, but they never did.

“I figured if they couldn’t help me with basic fact-checking, there was no point. They weren’t going to help me with deeper fact-checking,” she said. “I made the decision to instead run things by my sources, (many of whom) were primary.”

Kane said she didn’t expect Apple to like the book, but she was surprised when Cook made the public statement criticizing “Haunted Empire,” because Apple traditionally doesn’t comment on books about the company.

She stands by her book, saying that it’s fair, balanced and neutral. She had talked to former and some current Apple employees to get the sense of the company’s culture. And after the book was published, Kane said she received email from some “surprising people” who praised the book and its accuracy.

Not having easy access to Apple forced her to be more resourceful in her reporting, and more skeptical of the official company line, she said.

“When you don’t get the cooperation, you work that much harder to … get what the truth is. The truth won’t be colored by the company’s perspective,” she said. “When you’re talking to a company officially, they do have a vested interest in making themselves look as good as possible. When you don’t have that official view with those colored lenses, I think it lets you see things more clearly for what they are.”

Before Kane’s book was released, Adam Lashinsky wrote “,” a story about the company’s strategies, innovation and transition into new leadership post-Jobs.

He did receive help from Apple with fact checking, but he was not granted any interviews with company management.

“Through their lack of cooperation, they ceded total control to me,” he said. “I drove the agenda, I chose what I wanted to write about without any influence from them. There’s a downside to access — there are pros and cons.”

Still, Charles Fishman, author of “,” said he trusts that he can avoid being unduly influenced by the company line.

“I will always take cooperation, I will always take access, I don’t fear being bought out,” he said.

Unintended benefits

Wal-Mart — following in the legacy of Sam Walton, who famously distrusted the press — didn’t cooperate with Fishman when he was writing his book in the early 2000s.

“That was in the DNA of Wal-Mart,” Fishman said.

Walton believed that talking to the press was a waste of time because when an employee was talking to a reporter, he wasn’t doing anything for the business. He also feared that competitors would see what the company had said to reporters, potentially giving away strategies.

Fishman said Wal-Mart now grants more media access than it did when he was writing his book. After his book was published, Wal-Mart officials, pleased with his fairness, reached out to Fishman and invited him to the company headquarters. He wrote follow-up chapters to his book with Wal-Mart’s cooperation.

But there were some unintended benefits to the company’s initial lack of cooperation, he said.

“The fact that they wouldn’t cooperate forced me to be hugely resourceful and energetic in finding people who would talk,” he said. “That resistance meant I ended up talking to people who I probably wouldn’t have talked to otherwise.”

He said it taught him an important lesson as a journalist — you can report anything if you’re determined enough. Writing about a person or a company without access to that subject challenges the journalist to find the information and the details elsewhere.

When Amey Stone, executive editor of CBS MoneyWatch, co-wrote “”in 2002, she had just 20 minutes with Weill himself.

“We had really written the whole book by the time they gave us access to him,” she said. “It was very strategic when it got down to that point.”

While hearing directly from Weill enriched the book by peppering it with direct quotes and anecdotes, she said she was prepared to publish the book without his input. In the course of her reporting, she had gone through decades of past interviews with Weill.

“I think the surprising thing is, when you actually do it, you can learn a lot about people without having talked to them,” she said. “Some of the most interesting books have been written without (the subject’s) cooperation.”

Accuracy with no access

A major downside that comes with a lack of cooperation from companies is the fear of getting something wrong.

Fishman sent Wal-Mart 10 pages of fact-checking questions after he was done writing. Some were routine questions, while some were more substantive. Wal-Mart didn’t answer any.

Fishman then hired a fact-checker to re-interview people and check every fact.

“If I got something wrong, Wal-Mart would say, ‘how right is the rest of the book?’” he said. “I didn’t want to give them the chance to pick out three tiny errors … and say the whole book is wrong.”

Last fall, Bloomberg Businessweek writer Brad Stone published “.” Stone spoke with several Amazon executives, but not Bezos himself.

Bezos’ wife, MacKenzie Bezos, gave the book a one-star review on Amazon.com. She opened her review pointing out a small error in the book — Stone got the date wrong of when Bezos read a certain book.

“Everywhere I can fact check from personal knowledge, I find way too many inaccuracies, and unfortunately that casts doubt over every episode in the book,” she wrote.

In a piece for Fortune magazine, Lashinsky wrote that MacKenzie Bezos used that one fact error as an opening to criticize the book, when in reality, she didn’t like the book because it painted Amazon and Bezos in an uncomfortable light. The company and its founder are portrayed as ruthless and willing to bypass laws to offer customers lower prices.

In an interview, Lashinsky said the situation with MacKenzie Bezos and Stone was unique, but those kinds of tensions between company officials and journalists are not uncommon.

“The press exists to inform and entertain their readers, and of course, to tell the truth,” he said. “Companies have only one goal — it’s not to tell stories and tell the truth and expose weaknesses, it’s to sell products and make money.”

Sometimes, companies grant access with the stipulation that they be able to see the book before it’s published.

Thomas Lee, who is the author of the upcoming “,” enjoyed deep access to Best Buy — on the condition that he submit his manuscript to the company before it’s published for fact-checking.

“That would never happen, nor should it, in a newspaper world. You don’t submit your stories beforehand,” he said. “In this case, I had more freedom to work, and it really satisfied them and they gave me tons and tons of access.”

Lee, who is still working on the manuscript, said he expects Best Buy to not like some of the content and ask for changes, but he won’t guarantee any. He said he expects a lot of negotiation with the company.

“They invested a shitload of time and access with me. It got to be at some point where they were volunteering things to me that I didn’t even ask for,” he said. “We’ll fight over (changes), but (the book is) going to happen and I think they want it to. I don’t think there’s any one thing that’s going to sink it. We’ll fight over it, and eventually, we’ll get through it.”

The companies’ strategy

Some of companies’ hesitation in participating in book projects stems from wanting to keep a competitive advantage and not release company secrets or strategies, said Paul Friga, associate professor at the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at UNC-Chapel Hill, who also wrote “The McKinsey Mind” and “The McKinsey Engagement.”

Also, the book-writing process is long, and executives often balk at devoting so much time to something that doesn’t directly benefit business, he said.

But there are some pros for the company to participate, Friga said — a book written about the company is free publicity.

And of course, cooperation gives the companies a chance to add their perspective to the story.

“I would say there are two things moving in the direction of more access: the understanding that you get to shape the stories, and the sense that if there’s bad news, it’s going to come out,” Fishman said. “You really are better off talking. Whatever you’re doing wrong, someone’s going to tell that story eventually.

“If the NSA can’t protect its most secret secrets from employees, what chance does Wal-Mart or Target or any of these companies actually stand?”

Nowadays, companies like Wal-Mart might give more access to business journalists, but there’s often a catch. Some companies are now requiring public relations staff to be present during interviews with executives, Fishman said.

“That’s just kind of chilling all the way around. That’s not the kind of story I want to write. I don’t want to write a story where someone’s following me around and eyeing who’s talking to me,” he said. “That chills the sense of vividness that you want in a story.”

Business journalists say they have come to expect the pushback from the companies, or the silence. It’s part of the culture between companies and journalists. Some say it shows that journalists’ work is relevant.

“I think the worst thing that could ever happen to you as a journalist is, someone just doesn’t give a shit about what you write about them,” Lee said. “If they don’t care, that means you have zero impact on them.”

Will is a senior business journalism major at UNC-Chapel Hill. She will intern this summer at Education Week and interned last summer with Reuters in New York.

By Nick Shchetko

The announcement arrived on Sept. 19, 2013, but barely took the tech media industry by surprise. Rumors about a potential breakup of the long-term relationship between The Wall Street Journal’s owner, News Corp., and one of the most popular technology blogs, AllThingsD, had surfaced months in advance.

The breakup meant that the whole AllThingsD team, led by tech journalism superstars Walter Mossberg and Kara Swisher, would be leaving the Journal in pursuit of a new venture. The move became the first link in a chain of several important announcements in technology journalism in the past year.

The tech news business has grown in significance over the years, along with the tech industry.

The information technology became so pervasive nowadays that literally no other industry can remain unaffected by the dramatic changes it facilitates. The influence of tech companies is huge, so as their value. The U.S. largest stocks by market capitalization are technology businesses: Apple, Google and Microsoft. Of these, Apple is the world’s most valuable company. With capitalization of roughly $510 billion, it leaves behind energy titans, industry giants and huge banks. The , $370 trillion, trumps everyone else but the financial sector. The next closest industry – raw materials – is roughly two times smaller.

In the informational era, it comes as no surprise that the media is at the forefront of both the changes technology brings and the coverage of these changes.

“Every technology company is a media company, and therefore every media company should be invested in or understand technology,” said David Cohn, the chief content officer at Circa, a mobile news startup.

During the last couple of years a number of large media companies beefed up their tech coverage by expanding tech beat desks or launching new ventures aimed at this market.

“Tech is part of most things, or will be soon, so journalists need to understand what that means,” said Dan Gillmor, a digital media expert.

“I don’t think a “tech reporter” is necessary for all niches. However, all journalists should have some training in learning how to use new tools,” said Gillmor, who teaches Digital Media Literacy and Entrepreneurial Journalism at the Arizona State University.

While literally every media outlet reports on the technological matters these days, there is a several dozen of English-language publications, primarily U.S.-based, that set the tone.

A large publication can barely remain relevant to its readers without professional journalists who could analyze the newest announcements from technology companies and explain their meaning an importance to wider audiences. That’s why tech desks at the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg News and several other large publications are sizable, and their headcounts keep growing.

Another group of media tone-setters is composed of a several dozen digitally native tech blogs that cover tech in all of its diversity. This group includes, most notably, TechCrunch, The Verge, Engadget, Ars Technica, CNET, Re/code (formerly AllThingsD), GigaOM and other similar outlets.

Finally, the picture of the general tech media landscape wouldn’t be complete without a vast number of personal blogs and relatively small shops that often focus on specific technology facets, such as search engines, digital security or company-specific news. These organizations or individuals often provide in-depth analysis and put news in the context of their field of interest.

This media landscape has been like that for about a decade, but recent trends in journalism have also affected tech media and introduced changes. The rise of the social media, most notably Twitter, transformed prominent journalists into media outlets of their own. “Writers with large followings are less tied to where they work at as a result. There’s more mobility,” said Gabe Rivera, founder of TechMeme, the site that aggregates the most important tech news from all across the web.

The big upheaval

In the beginning of 2014, several massive tech journalism projects started, and most of them revolved around journalist superstars.

Walt Mossberg, his business partner Kara Swisher and AllThingsD staff parted ways with the Journal to introduce Re/Code, a new tech news venture, launched in partnership with NBC. The Journal relaunched its own tech desk under WSJD brand and went on a hiring spree to expand its tech coverage. The latest talent acquisition Christopher Mims, a Quartz tech editor, will become the personal technology columnist to succeed Farhad Manjoo, who recently left the Journal for the New York Times.

The Times lost its tech talent, too. David Pogue, its personal technology columnist, joined Yahoo to start Yahoo Tech, heavily consumer-focused tech news site.

New media organizations that do not necessarily focus on tech, pay significant attention to the beat from day one. Vox.com, a new project of the renowned Washington Post’s journalist Ezra Klein, runs several high-caliber tech-related stories a day, tailored, however, not to industry professionals, but to the general public.

So does such variety mean the high – and growing – demand, or it just further fragments the market that may well be already overly saturated?

With regard to saturation, a media critic and New York University professor Jay Rosen said that one can “never sure of that” and suggests that maybe “the site we really want hasn’t been born yet.”

Gillmor points to the high “noise level” in tech journalism nowadays. “There’s been a surplus of tech journalism for some time, if what we mean by tech journalism is shallow reporting of small announcements and mini “scoops” about things that only a few people care about,” he said.

On the bright side, “we’re seeing deeper reporting than before, too, with some terrific journalism going on at Yahoo Tech, Re/Code and others,” Gillmor said.

The natural selection will eventually put the things in perspective. Tech media, often a preferred read of younger and more affluent audiences, enjoy close attention from advertisers.

“Are there more [tech] sites than the advertising market can support in the long run? Maybe, but if so we’ll find out soon enough when some disappear,” said Gillmor.

Paywall, or not to paywall

Advertising is not the only way of funding journalism these days. Jessica Lessin left the Wall Street Journal in the Summer of 2013 to found her own tech publication, The Information. The subscription-supported publication at $399 a year is more expensive than the Journal ($348). Lessin thinks that the price tag is justified: “We know the audience we want to go after – they’re professionals inside and outside of tech, an audience that pays for information that’s going to make them smarter and give them an edge and to be ahead of the curve,” she said in an interview.

“We know the audience we want to go after — they’re professionals inside and outside of tech, an audience that pays for information that’s going to make them smarter and give them an edge and to be ahead of the curve.”

It is “very much serving the business and industry, they’re like trying to be the Wall Street Journal … for the people in the know, the business leaders of the tech industry,” said Cohn.

“It is not there for consumers,” he added.

The question about the sustainability of the hard paywall strategy in the long run still lingers. But most of tech blogs and tech-specific publications remain free of charge for their readers. But publications may compile specific market research and analysis reports, based on carefully gathered and curated data that no one else provides, and charge a lot for the access to it. Business Insider’s BI Intelligence arm or Gigaom Research would be great examples of the approach.

And then there are conferences, of course

In the recent years, numerous tech websites went offline by hosting conferences that bring together thought leaders and executives from the tech industry. Tangible and intangible gains from these events turned out to be so significant that the large tech sites put a lot of time and effort into organizing and promoting these events. TechCrunch Disrupt, Wired Business Conference, Gigaom Structure, WSJDLive, Engadget Expand, Re/code’s Code Conference… – and that’s not nearly a full list.

The trend was set by Mossberg and Swisher, though it probably was an exception that proved the rule. The wildly popular tech conference they started doing for the Wall Street Journal in 2003, D: All Things Digital Conference in 2003, eventually gave birth to AllThingsD project in 2007. Nowadays it generally goes in the opposite direction: big tech sites are giving birth to massive conferences.

“The economics of live are better than the economics of ads, so I would expect the conferences to continue,” said Rosen. “Now we have to make them good. First step: if you’re a sponsor, doesn’t mean you get to talk,” he said.

Cohn agrees that the tech media-run conferences are financially justified. He is also not opposed to the idea, but highlights that this business may raise some eyebrows: “conferences are for, usually, the tech industry itself. So they [tech sites] sort of hosting a tech industry conference and charging and making money and sort of doing the thing, and then the next day they turn around and cover the tech industry.”

“It’d be as if, you know, the politics editors at the New York Times or at Washington Post had a conference for politicians … it’s very different,” he said. “For some reason we accept that for technology journalism organizations, tech sites to organize tech conferences for the tech industry,” said Cohn.

“I’m not trying to imply that it’s not justified or that anything bad is necessarily happening as a result of it, but I do think it’s kind of interesting nuanced relationship,” Cohn said. He noted that even much small media-backed pitching conferences that bring together venture capitalists and startup founders “are great for that [startups getting their opportunity to pitch], so it’s good for them, and again, it’s good for the site that organizes those.”

Major conferences charge hefty fees for access. Mossberg and Swisher’s new conference, The Code Conference, that starts in late May, is now sold out (registration fee – $6,500). There are still some spots for the WSJDLive conference in late October, at $5,000. Both events feature panels and speeches from the top tech companies’ executives, such as Google, Alibaba, Twitter, Apple and more.

But will these revenue sources remain sustainable in the long run for the new outlets? May well be, at least for some of them.

“I do believe Re/Code will do just fine financially, because its revenues are based largely on conferences that made AllThingsD profitable in the past,” said Rivera.

The new tech ventures with huge organizations behind their backs, such as the Wall Street Journal and Yahoo, would definitely do fine, but for smaller independent media it may not be necessarily the case. In the long run, the ones that provide readers with what they want would win.

It’s hard to estimate audience size and financial situation of the most tech media outlets, but thanks to TechMeme’s Leaderboard it’s possible to roughly evaluate how many scoops they deliver. It certainly has its limitations, but that’s the best tool publicly available. If we look at the data from the last 7 years, the ranking of tech news sources by their “Techmeme presence” will look like this:

1. TechCrunch – 139.49%[i]
2. Re/Code (formerly AllThingsD) – 56.44%
3. Engadget – 44.85%
4. The Next Web – 39.90%
5. The Verge – 39.22%
6. CNET – 38.42%
7. The New York Times – 37.62%
8. The Wall Street Journal – 35,91%
9. Reuters – 33,82%
10. GigaOM – 31,92%

It is interesting that TechCrunch has been the clear leader since the very inception of the leaderboard in October 2007. AllThingsD started to gain momentum in late 2010; so has the Wall Street Journal. CNET’s performance, however, slightly degraded over the years.

The Verge, arrived in 2011, became an instant hit – it ranked high overall even though it was not in the game for as long as most of the other outlets on the Top-10. The same is true for The Next Web – the project materialized in 2009.

This year, the most prominent players were TechCrunch (the clear number one), Re/code, The Journal and The Verge – these resources dominated top positions of the leaderboard.

Among the fresh cohort of tech sites, the “old-new” Re/code is definitely going strong. “I think they’re doing fantastic,” Cohn said. “They’ve proven themselves obviously with AllThingsD, and they’re doing it again with Re/Code … I think they’re doing a great job.”

Setting new media outlets aside, what’s next for the tech journalism? The audiences’ interest in technology matters will likely continue to grow, fueling the demand for better and more diverse tech reporting. But in many ways the coverage is probably going to be more focused and less broad, unless we’re talking about bigger media outlets catering to general audiences.

“General tech coverage, or broad tech coverage, at a certain point has diminishing returns,” said Cohn. “I do think that the most successful tech sites are not gonna be generalists, there’s only so many general tech sites that you really have or need or can win, right, I do think there gonna be more specialists.”

On the other hand, as the technology continues to reach out into multiple industries, the whole meaning of “technology” would broaden, and mainstream media has to react.

“So should every media outlet have a tech reporter? To some degree, yes. Even if you’re the Chronicle of Higher Education, technology is impacting education, right?” said Cohn.

Rivera also notes that “more mainstream/established publications are hiring tech writers.” His company’s example perfectly illustrates the “evolution” of tech industry.

TechMeme started as a company focused on the issues mostly tech bloggers were concerned with, but the convergence eventually exposed it to larger audiences and broader coverage. “Lines were too blurry for us to address an area any narrower than what we cover now: both hardware and software, both web and native applications, both enterprise and consumer, both people and products, and both commercial aspects and core technologies”, said Rivera in an interview to Business Insider.

Still, it’ll be a challenge for tech media outlets to serve both the industry and the general audience. “That which serves the industry and that which serves the public are, I think, heading for a split. That is what I would watch for in tech journalism,” said Rosen.

Shchetko is a master’s student at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication who will intern with the technology news desk of The Wall Street Journal in San Francisco this summer.

By Alex Dixon

Cutting staff has been a common trend for newspapers during the last several years. And business desks at newspapers aren’t exempt.

In 2010, The Washington Post cut its standalone business section, so did The Miami Herald. More recently, in 2013, the Cleveland Plain Dealer did, too.

But some newspaper editors and reporters are bucking the trend, expanding business news coverage or even starting business news publications of their own.

The city or the publication?

Most mornings Greg Gilligan checks the Richmond Biz Sense site.

Gilligan, the business editor of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, is one of Richmond Biz Sense’s biggest competitors.

“I think competition is good. It keeps us on our toes,” Gilligan says. “We have far greater distribution both print and online. We scoop them a lot and they scoop us sometimes.”

And while both publications report on business news, each has found a niche to fill in the Richmond, Va. market.

Aaron Kremer, who founded Richmond Biz Sense in 2008, says his site mainly caters toward local business owners and employees.

“You want to reach 140,000, then you pitch (Richmond Times-Dispatch) your story,” Kremer says. “If you want to reach 15,000 movers and shakers, that’s us.”

Biz Sense doesn’t even bother with the big companies.

“We like local companies,” Kremer says. “We don’t report on big companies. There’s not much to say about them.”

Gilligan cites a “fairly significant business community” in Richmond, with headquarters of several Fortune 500 companies, for the Times-Dispatch expansion of business coverage.

In 2008, the Times-Dispatch had a business section tucked inside the metro section. In 2010, Gilligan was named the business editor. And in 2011, the paper brought back a standalone section Tuesday through Saturday with one full page of stock information.

In Houston, Texas, things aren’t much different.

When Nancy Barnes came in at the end of 2013 as editor of the Houston Chronicle, expanding business coverage was a main priority.

Laura Goldberg, business editor of the Chronicle, says the paper is currently filling positions for a banking and financial reporter, an investigative reporter to focus on energy companies, and a reporter to focus on big public companies.

Goldberg says there are a significant amount of Fortune 500 companies in Houston and an “appetite for business news among readers across all platforms.”

And the Chronicle certainly has competition in Houston as it expands, with the Houston Business Journal, various trade publications covering energy companies, and with Reuters, The New York Times, Bloomberg and AP with bases there.

Julie Doll, business editor of the Wichita Eagle, said the Wichita Business Journal is physically across the street. She said this provides “healthy competition” on breaking news and on how and what the Eagle covers.

But while some markets are saturated with business coverage, Kremer said not every area is fit for these outlets.

“There’s a bunch of factors,” he said. “First, you have to have a flow of interesting business news.”

For example, he said a market scope of specifically Chapel Hill, N.C., is too small for a business publication, whereas a business publication covering all of New York would be too big.

Bringing in Revenue

Doll says expansion of business sections has a high potential for probability.

In September 2006, the Eagle expanded from about a page to two pages every day and to an eight-page section on Thursdays.

“The business community has been real supportive of publications and news,” Doll said.

It traces back to the roots these Wichita, Kan., businesses had in advertising with papers she said, some back as far as 100 years.

And she said it’s about mutual support. For example, the Eagle posts a job section on its website to help Wichita businesses find employees.

Gilligan says that three-to-four days per week, the Times-Dispatch runs a two column, full-page ad to support the standalone section.

And while businesses’ print advertising may help support the business sections, Gilligan and Doll said the advertising does not influence the content in any way.

While Biz Sense has no revenue from print advertising, it has diversified its sources through online ads, emails, and even community events.

Biz Sense runs a Daily Newsfeed, which is a daily email sent out to 13,000 subscribers, which Kremer says brings in a lot of advertising revenue.

Biz Sense also hosts community events, such as “Kitchen Confidential,” a panel discussion with some of the most popular restaurateurs in Richmond.

Kremer said the events are lucrative.

Kremer said in a Talking Biz News article that this is where Biz Sense sees the biggest growth, in the form of selling sponsorship to these events.

“We use our news instincts to dream up topics we know will hook our audience,” Kremer said in the article. “Then we tell the story live on stage.”

Cutting Back

Gilligan said he thinks not prioritizing business coverage is foolhardy.

The two key things the public needs to know about are government and business, Gilligan said.

Kremer says the business beat is not a loved beat for daily papers.

“Sports and cops are the main strengths,” Kremer says. “Business is not their bread and butter.”

According to Show Me the Money by Chris Roush, just 38 percent of news executives say that business is a high priority in their newsrooms.

And when it comes time to prioritize, many newspapers aren’t looking at the business desks.

In an article by Mitch Leff, president of Leff & Associates Public Relations, he writes “The recession decimated media companies. Staffs were slashed…in many cities the once-separated business section has been folded into other sections.”

An article on Talking Biz News said that more than 250 business journalists lost their jobs due to media closings, layoffs or newsroom buyouts in the first six months of 2009.

Other Platforms

While the business cutbacks in 2009 may have been correlated with cutbacks in all newspaper sections, many papers are slow to refocus business coverage.

However, papers that once cut standalone sections are beginning to bring them back as the economy recovers.

The Baltimore Sun brought back its standalone section in 2010 and The Columbus Dispatch and Idaho Statesmen did in 2013.

In a column on the The Columbian’s site, former business editor Courtney Sherwood wrote, “With so much uncertainty about the economy, business news is as important as it has ever been.”

Even though the paper, based in Vancouver, Wash., has had to fold in the standalone section on most days, she wrote that the reporting quality is still the same.

And business coverage cutbacks in print may lead to more opportunities on other platforms.

The Columbian launched a blog called Strictly Business, with “details from reporters’ notebooks and thoughts about how national headlines may reflect on us here,” according to Sherwood.

In Savannah, The Savannah Morning News launched a tabloid with a separate website and Twitter feed, called Business in Savannah.

The publication features profiles of businesses and stories on business-related concerns as opposed to investigative pieces or breaking business news.

The Reader

For many publications, the average business-news reader isn’t the average newspaper reader.

Doll said Wichita has a community built on “entrepreneurship and small business,” and that the business news is structured more as a business-to-business section.

Kremer said local business people need what papers write and business desks don’t always write with that in mind.

Gilligan said the Times-Dispatch has kept one full page of stock information in order to cater to the readers who like to view this.

Gilligan said it’s a juggling act on determining business coverage on a local, national and international level but it is important to provide readers with local content. Around 70 percent of coverage is local at the Times-Dispatch, Gilligan said.

Kremer said he enjoys when he calls someone from a local business for coverage and they are already familiar with Biz Sense as a reader.

“People love to tell their stories, and they love to see themselves,” Kremer said.

Dixon is a business journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication