NY Post biz reporter Sanders talks about her beat

Holly Sanders, who covers advertising and marketing for the New York Post and previously worked at Bloomberg News, talked with PR Week about her beat and working at the paper in a Q&A posted on Monday.

Here is an excerpt:

PRWeek: Do all the reporters at the Post have an inherently punchy writing style, or is that the rewrite desk punching up the articles?

Sanders: There’s more rewriting that goes on in the stories up front. So the general news section, the city, [and] the crime coverage: there’s certainly a much heavier hand there by the rewrite men, so to speak.

On the business desk, we operate pretty autonomously of the rest of the general news. There’s obviously coordination, but we don’t share the same editors, for instance. And I would say there’s probably less rewriting on the business side of things, and we tend to play it a lot straighter in the business section, to be perfectly honest. We like punchy writing, but we probably don’t use as many puns as they do up front.

PRWeek: Whom do you consider your competitors? Is it less the New York Daily News, coming from the business section?

Sanders: I think in just the past year, [the Daily News has become] primarily personal finance. It will occasionally have a media story, but far less often than it used to. So in some ways, that sort of killed that matchup, I think.

We obviously have a focus on things that are of interest to New York. We’re heavy on real estate, Wall Street, and media. We also like a healthy dose of ego in our stories. I guess in that sense, we consider ourselves to be competitive with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, or any major paper’s business section.

People may disagree with that, but I would say that is what we aspire to be, just with the unique Post spin on things.

Read more here.