Comparing mortgage-backed securities to chicken parts

A good business journalist needs to provide steady content to their employer so that they can spend the time to report and write the stories they want to cover in their spare time.

That was the advice given Friday by Allan Sloan, the senior editor at large at Fortune magazine and one of the top business journalists in the country. Sloan spoke at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference.

Sloan said such a strategy allowed him to become a well-known business journalist and has enabled him to now only write deeply reported stories with big impact.

“I believed in the cencept of feed the beast,” said Sloan. “I was a beat reporter. I fed the beast, and then I went off and got to work on what I wanted to work on. I bought time to do what I wanted to do by doing what I needed to do. I just went out and learned by asking people a simple question — How does this work?”

Sloan said his writing style is simple — tell the readers a story that they can enjoy and understand. He looks for a beginning, a middle and an end in his stories.

” That’s how I still write. And it works. In print it works extremely well. And on radio, it works well because you explain it in perfect English.”

When going over a story about mortgage-backed securities, an editor asked Sloan why a Wall Street firm was slicing the investment into smaller parts and selling them. Sloan explained to the editor that it was like how Tyson Foods sells chicken — they cut it up and sell the parts because they can make more money by doing so.

He liked the analogy so much that he used it in his story.

When asked by Reuters columnist John Wasik for any icebergs — topics that business journalists should be covering now that are currently beneath the surface, Sloan showed his competitive streak.

“You guys have been kicking my ass,” said Sloan. “I am not going to tell you anything. Don’t start with me.”