Making changes at International Business Times

Peter S. Goodman is the editor in chief of International Business Times, a position he has held for almost three months.

He previously was the executive business editor and global news editor of The Huffington Post.

Goodman joined the Huffington Post in the fall of 2010, after two decades in traditional newspaper journalism, most recently as the national economic correspondent for the New York Times, where he played a leading role in the paper’s award-winning coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession. Prior to that, he spent a decade at the Washington Post as a foreign correspondent and a financial writer.

Goodman is the author of “PAST DUE: The End of Easy Money and the Renewal of the American Economy” (Times Books, 2009), which draws on more than a decade’s reporting to trace the origins of the breakdown in American economic life while exploring ways to reinvigorate the economy. The book was selected as an Editor’s Choice title by the New York Times Book Review and as one of Bloomberg’s Top 50 Business Books.

Goodman grew up in New York City and graduated from Reed College in 1989. He began his newspaper career as a feature writer in Kyoto, Japan for the English language-Japan Times, then spent three years freelancing from Southeast Asia for several newspapers, among them the Los Angeles Times, Dallas Morning News, Miami Herald and London’s Daily Telegraph. Returning to the United States in 1993, Goodman worked as a Metro reporter for the Anchorage Daily News in Alaska, where he covered the Wasilla City Council and a then-unknown member of the body known as Sarah Palin.

After a year at the University of California, Berkeley — where Goodman gained a Master’s in Asian Studies — he joined the Washington Post as metro reporter in the summer of 1997. By 1999, he was the newspaper’s telecommunications reporter, giving him a front row seat for the emergence of the Internet as a force in commerce, culture and ordinary life.

Goodman spoke Tuesday afternoon with Talking Biz News about how International Business Times covers business and economics stories. What follows is an edited transcript.

Why leave HuffPo for International Business Times?

It was just an amazing chance to take over an entire newsroom, top to bottom, to have full control, from the front page to the social media strategy to thinking about how to use the resources available to us.

What did you think of its coverage before you started?

I had a sense that they had reached critical mass in terms of traffic. They were already quite large, and they were going after stories that most of the American press doesn’t always cover. It is truly an international place. The sensibility is global, and I like that strategy about making the connections between stories playing out on multiple continents and explaining them to readers, to help them find ways into stories that explain how the real estate market in the United States is connected to streams of finance in China and is connected to commodities in Brazil.

I liked helping them move from building up traffic to getting more sophisticated and pushing along the coverage and eventually thinking about investigative reporting.

What have you done since getting there to upgrade the coverage?

We hired a bunch of really talented writers. We hired a China expert. He is now anchoring our China coverage. We hired a woman who just graduated from the School of International and Public Affairs program at Columbia and is a Middle East expert. And we are in the process of bringing in some breaking news writers, and talking to people about some various international postings.

I brought in a terrific editor by the name of Nancy Cooper who was at Newsweek for two decades. She is anchoring our most ambitious daily stories and helping out on features. And I have been moving us away from simply chasing clicks to figuring out how to structure beats that can help us conceptualize scoops. We have given someone claim to the food beat. We have moved someone to retail and the business of fashion. We have beefed up our China team.

And we are working with our newsrooms around the world. We have an IBT in London that was essentially a siloed operation. We have now fused the London newsroom with our Bangalore newsroom and our newsroom here in New York into a truly 24-7 global newsroom operation. We pick up stories from London and add to them and send them back. India is anchoring our overnight coverage but also moving more into original reporting in India. They did some good coverage of the India election and the new prime minister, Modi.

How big is your staff, and what are the primary beats?

Globally, it’s about 150. In the U.S, we have about 70 at last count.

How do you decide on a daily basis what gets covered?

We pick our spots. We’re interested in subjects that are truly global. We are cognizant of the fact that we are writing for a global audience. We have a large audience reading the U.S. version outside of the United States. So we’re looking for the global angle, and particularly the global money angle. Technology stories are inherently important to us because they are always global. Energy is the same way. And the rise of China of a cultural and social phenomenon as as well as its rise as a global powerhouse is an important story.

IBT is international business news in the broadest sense. We are covering the conflict in Syria. If you are a global business publication, you are concerned about how the world works. You are concerned about Syria as a grave humanitarian disaster as well as a venue for geopolitical conflict, one with religious elements, implications for energy. That is not a business story per se, but if you are concerned about the workings of the world, then you have to take note of it and understand it.

Is there an international focus on every story?

No. The United States is still the largest market on Earth, and China is the second-largest by most measures and the biggest by other measures. We cover the U.S., one because we have a lot of readers in the U.S. But any American story that rises to a certain level is of global consequence. We will write about U.S. auto sales and the job market. We will write about the U.S. stock market. If you are a global publication, you have to cover the U.S. and you have to cover China.

What are your expansion plans?

We’re going to be looking strategically and somewhat gradually to role out an international reporting team. We are building up our breaking news reporting team. We want to get more original, fresher. We have spent a lot of time thinking about when our readers are demanding what type of news. So we were holding stories in the morning, and we found that we have a growing readership in Asia that wants those stories in the American evening hours. Our page now gets refreshed with regularity, and we want to be on top of the news. That has not been our strong suite.

Whom do you see as your competition?

I see anybody who has gained scale and is aiming for quality as potential competition. Both in terms of breaking news and explaining news and getting ahead of news. I don’t have one competitor or one set of competitors, but we admire what the Wall Street Journal has built. Everyone admires what the New York Times has achieved. We see Quartz as embodying some of the values that we uphold. They do what they do very well. And it is truly global. The Economist is still around and prospering for good reasons. We want to do that in a real newsy way.

What’s the biggest thing I didn’t ask you about?

One of the things that is essential to our mission is elevating the quality of our writing. So in the people that we hire, we are looking for skill there and we are also investing in editing. We want young writers to improve and grow their game.