Getting inside Wall Street to cover Wall Street

Marshall Watkins of The Stanford Daily spoke with financial journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times and CNBC after he spoke at a campus event on Saturday.

Here is an excerpt:

TSD: As a financial journalist, how have you found the challenge of reporting on a close-knit community like Wall Street? At this point, would you consider yourself an insider?

AS: It’s funny. By default, as a journalist, I’m clearly an outsider to this world. Over the years, I’ve covered it for a long time…but in the book, part of the challenge was trying to get inside, trying to get the reader inside the room so he could see what’s being said.

It’s much harder than it used to be. As a reporter…this has been a major shift. When I started, there wasn’t  this industrial complex around protecting all these people from the press. It used to be you could call somebody up and understand what’s happening, get a little of the inside scoop or try and get some context for what’s happening…Now, there’s an army of lawyers, there’s an army of PR people, there’s a battalion of people whose entire job is to keep you as far away from the building as humanly possible. That has made, I would argue, reporting much more challenging in terms of really providing the sort of deep reporting and analysis…and it’s only gotten worse post-financial crisis.   Given so many of the rules have changed, we’re all getting the information at the same time, and there’s a lot more of it. The bad news is that for the kind of deep reporting that tries to really bring you inside what’s going on, that’s harder than ever, sadly.

Read more here.