Amazon story teaches painful lesson about business reporting

Greg David, a Crain’s New York Business columnist and journalism professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, writes about how most reporters missed the story about Amazon and its plans for New York.

David writes, “Unfortunately, one of the major reasons for the debacle over Amazon’s plan to bring 25,000 jobs to New York is that local media (Crain’s and a few others excepted) acted as if they were still first- semester students in CUNY’s J-School. The one hopeful sign is that when Amazon walked away from its plan, startled reporters and editors figured out they had been telling the wrong story.

“Almost from the moment in November when Amazon decided to put its second headquarters in Queens, opponents grabbed the spotlight. The political reporters are obsessed with the impact of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and once she seized on the issue with other progressive groups, their opposition and whether they could defeat the establishment became the story.

“But less than a month later, the respected Quinnipiac poll found that voters in Queens and the rest of the city supported the Amazon deal by a wide margin. The media narrative was simply wrong, but the reporters (too few of whom were business reporters) clung to their story line. ”

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