How to find stories from financial reports

Michelle Cheng of Quartz writes about a panel the financial news site had that featured journalists finding stories in financial reports.

Cheng writes, “Controversies around cryptocurrency firm Tether had been so well-reported, said Kadhim Shubber, that he and his colleague at the Financial Times decided to take a different approach by  looking at the people running the company instead.

“That led to a (paywalled) profile of Tether’s chief financial officer Giancarlo Devasini, an Italian entrepreneur who was selling CDs and DVDs before he ran the $60 million cryptocurrency company. Devasini had claimed that his previous business, which he sold right before the financial crisis, had earned up to $100 million in revenue. Shubber and his colleague discovered in 2017 that his business had revenues below $12 million, and that it was brought down by a warehouse fire. As a result, Devasini was coming into cryptocurrency not from a position of hugely profitable exit, but from a business that had quite literally been destroyed.

“As Shubber pointed out, journalists can access records on almost every successful company. At the same time, you can speak to the people who work at the companies and scour the internet for traces of their business.”

Read more here.