NewsBios, the service that provides profiles of influential business journalists, says it has now sold more than 7,000 journalist dossiers, each for $69.95.
Unlike ‘official’ bios and resumes that news organizations and individual reporters provide the public, NewsBios dossiers include pertinent public information about the reporters and editors it investigates. Recent “best sellers” include Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times, Dennis Berman of The Wall Street Journal and Patricia Sellers of Fortune.
Frequently, NewsBios turns up controversies in which the journalists have been involved; prior jobs the journalists would sooner forget; family relationships that might bear on how a journalist views a story; or opinions the journalists have expressed in venues other than their own news organization.
Among the most popular profiles sold by NewsBios are those of reporters at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Financial Times, Fortune, BusinessWeek, Forbes, Bloomberg, Reuters and other financial news outlets.
“Companies and their PR agencies understand that these journalists hold great sway over how investors and the public at large view them,” says Dean Rotbart, NewsBios founder and executive editor. “With a single story, a reporter making $80,000 a year can impact the market value of a publicly traded company – for better or worse – by hundreds of millions of dollars. So you better know with whom you are dealing.”
NewsBios, currently celebrating it 20th anniversary, employs professional journalists and researchers to scour public sources of information for every nugget of relevant information about the reporters and editors it profiles.
NewsBios’ sources include alumni directories and newsletters; professional association membership lists and newsletters; court and property tax records; blogs, social networking sites, paid media newsletters and directories; and its own proprietary databases.
And now, here’s my “bio” of Rotbart: He is a former Wall Street Journal reporter. When I worked for BusinessWeek in the early ’90s, my boss, editor Steve Shepard, prohibited anybody working for the magazine from talking to Rotbart after he published a series of stories about overhauls at the magazine in his TJFR newsletter. The controversy resulted in a story in the New York Times.
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Chris: Good memory. What you may not recall is that our reporting on Shepard and BusinessWeek won first place nationally for investigative reporting from the Newsletters Publishers Association. Shepard, while espousing a free press, certainly tried to restrain BusinessWeek reporters from the freedom of speech they encourge their sources to excercise. Now Shepard is a Dean of a Journalism school. I wonder what he teaches his students?