New to the economics beat

Columbia Journalism Review assistant editor Joel Meares interviewed New York Times reporter Michael Powell, who switched over to covering the economics beat earlier this year.

Here is an excerpt:

How did you transition from Obama to economics?

Since the campaign, much of my writing has been caught up in the foreclosure epidemic, which had hit other parts of the country first but was hitting New York with a savagery, particularly in black and Latino neighborhoods. That led me in an unplanned way to my present beat. The business section has several national economics writers and a good friend of mine, Peter Goodman, was moving on. He suggested my name to Larry Ingrassia, the editor, and he came to me in February and asked if I was interested in doing this. Frankly, I had never ever thought of working in a business section of any paper. Though, to a certain extent that’s a conceit, and one that I had jettisoned along the way.

As you grow up in your views, if you’re lucky enough to work for a section that makes larger connections, you start to realize the extent to which all the great schismic issues in this country go back to class and to economics. Certainly, in the last few years it’s hard to imagine a bigger story than the collapse of the American economy. Their pitch to me — which was the only pitch that would make sense given that I came in with no particularly deep knowledge of economics — was to writer broadly about how the economy is affecting people on the ground. The interplay between the economy and people’s lives, the interplay between the economy and race, and the interplay between the economy and politics. So I started the beat in May.

Read more here.