How Bloomberg’s Basak develops sources

Sonali Basak

Sonali Basak, global financial correspondent for Bloomberg Television, spoke with Russell Sherman, host of “Press Profiles,” about how she reports and writes, including using sources on background.

Here is an excerpt:

Russell Sherman
You also try to talk to lawyers and CCOs, do you find them willing to engage? They’re not necessarily the money managers are the people that are used to being on the front line? So do you find them willing to engage even on background conversations?
Sonali Basak
Yes, I think background is really important because you give people the opportunity to be open with you as much as they humanly can be very much. So it’s funny, because everyone knows this, to cover a beat a general counsel so often is the entryway into a company. They’re the person that is protecting the CEO, it’s a confidant. And I’ve often made that my first meeting because it’s somebody that I’m able to get a lay of the land of early on with and then how that company relate what the sensitivities are, how they relate to the rest of the world. Funnily enough, sometimes that leads to awesome stories to that laid out. One of my favorite is the top lawyer at Morgan Stanley, we wrote about once, who was essentially starting his own political party, I got to know him because I’ve heard of him before. And he’s well known in the legal world, former Davis Polk, which is a close friend of Morgan Stanley. He was wearing an American flag cufflink. And so I asked about it. And it turns out, he was starting political party, and it ended up being a Businessweek story, written by me and Max Abelson about how Morgan Stanley’s top lawyer was trying to upend the political system. And yeah, sometimes they do become stories themselves. But it generally has helped me a lot and my job lately that’s been covering the midterms. From the vantage point of these large banks and private equity firms, it’s super important to build that relationship early on, because you’re gonna find a lot of filings, you’re gonna have a lot of questions. And so that relationship is so so important.