Welcome to Dawn Wotapka’s Media Movers Column: In conversation with Chris Roush

[Editor’s note: TBN warmly welcomes Dawn Wotapka, who with this week debuts her “Media Movers” column. We’re extraordinarily lucky to have Dawn, a veteran of both the journalism and public relations fields, anchoring this effort. Check back on Tuesdays for her latest profile/Q&A.] 

Welcome to the debut of Media Movers, a weekly column featuring interviews with a wide range of communicators from top-tier, trade, PR and up-and-coming models. Our premiere installment features Chris Roush, arguably the OG of business journalism and founder of Talking Biz News.

Roush blazed a trail for business journalism before it was an established field. Since then, he’s nurtured many young journalists who have gone on to do everything from anchor top shows to break front-page news. These days, he’s a dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University, where he’s often accompanied by Gus and Gracie, two sweet labs who give and receive lots of love from journalism’s next batch of superstars.

Says Lou Carlozo, the incoming editor and publisher of TBN: “Chris has given me more than mighty big shoes to fill: He’s an acknowledged master of his craft, including on the mentoring and guidance side. As a colleague, I’m an admirer and a fan.”

Dawn Wotapka: What made you decide to go into journalism?

Chris Roush: When I was in high school, I thought I wanted to be a sports announcer. That was my mindset when I went to college. But I got involved with the student newspaper covering sports. I realized that sports reporters really don’t have much of a lifestyle because they’re traveling with the team, and the team is on the road half of the time. So in college I switched over to news and started being more of a traditional reporter. It was in the back of my mind the whole time that I was going to be in communications. But the journalism part of it really didn’t coalesce until I was in college and working for the student newspaper.

Dawn: Why business journalism?

Chris: When I graduated from college, I had gone to graduate school at the University of Florida. I was leaving school, needed a job and had interned for the St. Petersburg Times in Pasco County, Fla., covering cops and courts. I really hated it, so I was looking for something else. One of my best friends from college was at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and she told me about an opening that they had to cover business. I was like, “OK, I’ve never done business.” I had never even taken a business class in college.

It was learning on the job. I mean the first week, the reporter I was replacing kind of trained me but after that, I was pretty much on my own and having to learn a lot of business journalism during that time. This was before the Internet, 1989, so it was a lot of going to the courthouse and looking at public records, looking at real estate records, looking at lawsuits. There was a downtown development district that was a quasi-public entity in Bradenton, and so I was getting public records from them. I was spending a lot of time in the courthouse and talking to people. I was covering a port at that time – and there was a port commission that was public, so I was going to their public meetings as well.

Dawn: You’re in academia now. How did that shift come about?

Chris: I’d started teaching part-time when I was at in Charlottesville, Va., as editor in chief of a company called SNL Financial. That has since been bought by Standard & Poor’s and combined into Standard & Poor’s news operation. Washington and Lee, which was about an hour away, was starting a business journalism program and the person that they had hired to start it backed out before the semester started.

So I went and taught the business journalism classes to help them get off the ground, but also to recruit students to come work for me. So that’s how I got into teaching and I found I really enjoyed it.

I applied for the job at the University of North Carolina in 2002. It was really partly personal, in that my sons were 10 and 5 at the time. I felt like I was missing out on a lot of things with them and becoming a professor would allow me to spend more time with my kids and give me a more flexible schedule while still doing journalism part-time.

Dawn: What do you think journalism students will be learning about in a decade?

That’s a really good question. To me, the basics of journalism have not changed. It’s still about the importance of getting facts right and being fair and balanced. I don’t see that changing.

We’ve got to get away from this whole concept of being objective. Nobody is objective. But if you can be fair and balanced in your reporting. I think that’s where we need to go. The problem with journalism today is that everybody is trying to be objective – whatever that term means – and quote both sides to a story, or quote both sides to an issue. Sometimes it’s pretty obvious that one side of an issue is just blatantly false and not helping society.

Dawn: You recently wrote just wrote a book, “The Future of Business Journalism.” Tell us about it.

Chris: It’s about why the future of business journalism matters to Wall Street and Main Street. If I’m a CEO of a big company that’s publicly traded, or even not publicly traded, or if I’m a trader on Wall Street, I can get the business and economics news that I need. I can get it from The Wall Street Journal, I can get it from Bloomberg or another wire service. I can spend tens of thousands of dollars on a special news service. There’s all kinds of business news for what I need.

But with the 31 million small business owners out there and the 100 million consumers out there, we’ve really forgotten about them as consumers of business news and that’s a problem. Small business owners and consumers rely or relied on the media to provide business and economics news that they needed to make important decisions. For a lot of them, that’s not available anymore and it’s hurting us.

Dawn: What do you think is the next book that needs to be written about journalism?

Chris: Probably a book about how screwed up political coverage is and how it needs to change. I hope I’m wrong, but I feel the same way about a lot of political coverage that a lot of other people feel, and they’re just kind of disgusted about what they’re reading. So they no longer read it anymore.

It’s gotten to be that “he said, she said” objectivity-type stuff that that really doesn’t tell the reader what’s actually going on and what’s important anymore, and it’s just a waste of time. So much of journalism these days is focused and centered around that. It’s just not helpful.

Dawn: For any new readers, tell us about the founding and the history of Talking Biz News and how it grew into this must-read.

Chris: Talking Biz News started in 2005. It was originally a project of the education committee for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, now the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. Shortly after it was founded, I became the sole poster, for lack of a better term. It has been independent of SABEW for at least a decade.

In the beginning, I was hoping to provide a place where my students could learn what was going on in the world of business journalism and use it to get them interested in careers there.

In 2019, when I left UNC to become dean of Quinnipiac, I sold it to a financial communications firm in New York called Vested. They really laid out a good strategy. For a couple of years now they’ve paid staff to post items on the site. They just rolled out a redesign of the site and have pumped up the subscriptions to the daily email newsletter. They’re handling the nuts and bolts and building on the foundation.

Dawn Wotapka is a former Wall Street Journal reporter who loves to read and write. She lives in Atlanta with her husband and two children. She is a slow runner and an avid Peloton user. To submit tips for her Media Movers column, you can contact her at dwotapka@gmail.com. Be sure to connect with Dawn on LinkedIn.