Tag Archives: Business Journalism

How to get the most out of a conference

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A six-hour drive and soccer match (Go Muckrakers!) later and I am back in my beautiful apartment in Missouri.

It was a long few days at the SABEW Conference in Indianapolis, but it was so worth it.

Let me just share a few things I think I took away from this conference that I think is important to know for journalists:

Bring business cards. This, in particular, is the main thing I wish I would have done. It’s the best way to network at conferences and while I received many business cards that I intend to use, I wish I had been able to reciprocate.

Don’t always hang with those you know. Many people will not approach large groups if they think that the group is good just talking among themselves. Walking around by yourself gives more people a good excuse to walk up and talk. It worked for me.

Don’t ask questions in panels if you can’t elaborate. Some people like to ask questions to bring attention to themselves. Sometimes it works and the person looks smart. But when a panelist asks you to elaborate and you cannot, it just looks bad. Don’t ask questions for the sake of asking questions.

If someone from a news agency invites you out to dinner or drinks, do it. It’s very easy to be tired at the end of a long day of sitting in panels. But when a potential employer wants to get to know you better, it’s a good thing. I’m still convinced it’s how I got my summer internship from the NICAR Conference a few weeks back.

Take notes. There are a lot of interesting things that come up in panels. Some can become story ideas. Some can become ideas to improve your news outlet. Either way, if you’re going to be there, you might as well listen.

That’s all I got for now. It’s time for me to get back to school work and finish this week strong before Spring Break.

What I Learned: SABEW day two

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I am le tired.

Day Two at the SABEW conference has been a very busy one. Panels started up bright and early at 7:15 a.m. and I stayed until about 4.

I sat in on sessions that included the governor of Indiana, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the vice president for marketing at Ford.

1. Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels doesn’t want to run for national office. Many Republicans have been calling on Daniels to put his name in the hat and run for president. He’s said time and time again that he does not want this. So what about vice president? Another adamant no.

Daniels was a very genuine-seeming man and a lot of his economic views are grounded in strong fact. I cannot speak to his other views, but I could see why so many people wanted him to enter the race. He also believes in journalism which is nice to see in a politician. He called journalism a “proud calling” and said that it’s as important as ever.

2. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does good work. As a government entity, I would have expected their website to be relatively vapid of information. However, there are a lot of great statistics on the site. Unemployment data is what most people know them for, but their location quotient calculator is a hidden gem.

A location quotient is a fairly unknown, but very important, tool for financial journalists. It is the calculation of how strong certain industries are in various areas of the country. With this tool, when someone claims that an area of the country needs a certain type of jobs, journalists can use this tool to see if this claim is well-founded.

3. There are a ton of resources online for personal finance. For students there are a few great sites that deal with student loans and student loan debt. The National Center for Education Statistics is an organization within the U.S. Department of Education thats primary focus is collecting and analyzing this data.

There are plenty of other sites, including a few journalism ones, that help people to focus on their personal finance in other areas. Kiplinger Personal Finance has a tool for calculating retirement living expenses. Yahoo! Finance shows how much money you can save by cutting small expenses. Bankrate.com allows you to compare housing, taxes and cost of living in various cities. The list goes on and on.

4. China’s auto industry is booming. The Chinese auto industry has surged pass the United States and it’s not going to look back. The Chinese market is a fascinating one in that about 50 percent of the cars sold within China are brands unknown to Americans. The reason many Americans don’t know these brands is that they couldn’t pass the rigorous safety standards in the U.S. and so they remain in China and other countries.

China is also exporting cars to places it never had before. China currently has about 10 percent of the market in Chile. In Brazil, it’s three percent and expanding quickly. In north Africa, the cars are starting to pop up. It’s a fascinating development that not many really saw coming.

5. Wire services are starting to offer business-related information graphics to many of their customers. Both the Associated Press and Thomson Reuters are starting to offer more and more of these graphics along with their stories. Business journalism has started to go the way of the graphic, since it makes complicated business concepts easier to understand.

I got to talking with people who are working for both and the advancement is exciting. Business Journalism used to be pages upon pages of stock listings, and so I believe that moves like this one are a positive for the industry. The more we can communicate finance to the general public, the better the economy can get.

I’m quite exhausted from today and I’m thinking a nap is in order. One more day left and then it’s back to the real world.

As I bid adieu, I’d like to offer up Spendster, an awesome site that helps encourage smarter purchasing.

What I learned: Business Writer’s Conference Day 1

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One thing I love about the University of Missouri School of Journalism is that it provides me with opportunities to get out of the state on a regular basis.

It’s not that I don’t enjoy living in Missouri. I just enjoy the ability to get the most out of my time in graduate school.

Anyway, for the second time in three weeks, I am at a conference. Three weeks ago, I was working the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting conference in St. Louis. This weekend, I’m in Indianapolis at the conference for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, also known as SABEW.

It’s been a long day, but it’s been fun and relatively educational. Since this is a three-day conference, I think I’ll do a post each day with the five biggest things I learned each day. However, not all will be entirely journalism related.

So here goes:

1. Google is doing its best to help make journalists’ lives easier. For starters, I still don’t love their search. Because it can’t search behind paywalls or those random verifiers on some sites that make you spell words to verify your humanity, it doesn’t find everything.

However, things like Google Trends, Google Public Data and Google Insights are providing analytical data that journalists don’t have to piece together themselves. Better yet, with most things on their site being embeddable, journalists can use these tools on their sites without asking for permission.

2. Good business journalists are in high demand, because business jargon might as well be its own language. If you sat in on a speech by the Security and Exchange Commission chair, Mary Schapiro, as I did, you’d easily get lost if you weren’t an economist. If a journalist cannot understand the subject matter, he or she will never be able to communicate it to a broader audience.

That’s not to say that there aren’t great business journalists at this conference. On the contrary. Many of the journalists here are very good at what they do and very knowledgeable about the world of business. But this is just a small sample size.

3. Indianapolis is much smaller than I expected. I was expecting a hustling and bustling city. It does not seem that way from my vantage point. The city is very compact and even during busy hours the traffic isn’t terrible.

That being said, there’s a lot to like about this city. Monument Circle is gorgeous. The State House is just as pretty. The food is good. It’s very walkable. I can’t say that I would be averse to living here in the future, although I still think my likeliest destination is a major city by the coast.

4. The National Endowment for Financial Education is doing a lot to help students prepare themselves to be financially responsible. I was lucky enough to be one of the few invited to speak at a breakfast for the organization this morning, mostly involving my experiences with personal finance. Apparently I did a good job.

In the near future, I will be publishing a few blogs for the organization, about my own unique personal finance situation. As part of their College Connect program, I will share my experiences with college students across the country on what to do, and what not to do, when it comes to personal finance. The organization does good work, and I am excited to help them out.

5. The Indiana Pacers are in good hands. Tonight, I got the opportunity to hear Jim Morris, the Pacers’ president, speak. He’s a great speaker and very insightful. He knows a lot about basketball and is very passionate about bringing great basketball back to the state of Indiana.

I did not realize that the man was a former Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Programme. He’s a smart man, and very community oriented, and I was proud to shake his hand and chat him up a bit after his speech was done.

That’s it for today. Looking forward to a full day tomorrow. Stay tuned.