Future of biz journalism hinges on speed and targeting

The future of business journalism while uncertain appears promising, according to a panel of industry editors, but that future hinges on speed, efficiency and strategic targeting.

“As technology continues to change, you have to stay flexible,” said John McCorry, executive editor for the Americas for Bloomberg News.

The Associated Press’ use of automative technology to write short earnings stories drew criticism when it was announced in last June, but deputy business editor Brad Foss (right) said the program has turned into a success for the wire service.

“The goal, as I’ve said, is to free up time,” Foss said at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Chicago on Friday. “I know reporters are now able to produce enterprise stories on days where they normally would have had to write three earnings stories. We know higher value work is being done by people.”

Foss said using technology to write over 3,000 earnings stories each quarter is just one way the AP is taking its writing into the future, but he also stressed that each development in the newsroom to step into the future is just a chance.

“We are journalists operating a space where the future is coming at us, and a lot of it is trial and error,” Foss said.

McCorry agreed that commoditized and automated news is crucial for newsrooms moving forward particularly with information that is harder to everyday readers to scope out.

“Automating that information to get it out in front of your editor is something that tis changing the face of business journalism as we speak,” McCorry said.

He added that Bloomberg works to get reporters from all platforms, including online, radio, terminals and TV, to work together in order to propel its coverage into not only the future but also new markets.

“Having journalists in all those platforms to write one story, which hopefully we broke,” he said. “That takes innovation because if you’re going to get noticed on the web it has to have some arresting graphic information.”

Quartz editor of new initiatives Xana Antunes said an interesting thing about Quartz is that the stories that have the most and least amount of time spent on them end up being their most successful.

She added that the fact that the site is driven by its writers’ and readers’ obsessions help move it forward into the future.

“We are going to write about the things our audiences seem completely obsessed with,” she said. “Their obsessions became our obsessions.”

Meg Garner is a business journalism major at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication