Grant to help improve coverage of company earnings

The David and Helen Gurley Brown Institute for Media Innovation has awarded one of its 2014-2015 “Magic Grants” to a team of students who want to improve how business reporters cover earnings.

In direct response to criticisms of the rigor of business journalism, Earnings Inspector will provide business journalists a new tool to make the methods of forensic accounting more accessible. By sifting through a database of accounts of all public U.S. companies, Earnings Inspector will use fraud detection algorithms to report the likelihood of manipulated earnings.

The Earnings Inspector team consists of Caelainn Barr, Cecile Schilis-Gallego and Daniel Drepper, students at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Offered annually, Magic Grants are made possible by a gift from longtime Cosmopolitan magazine editor and author Helen Gurley Brown, who established the Brown Institute
as a partnership between Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and Stanford University’s School of Engineering.

All of the Magic Grant winners can be found here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.