Overseeing a business journalism experiment in San Francisco

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Marcus Chan, who became the business and technology editor of the San Francisco Chronicle a year ago, has been in charge of an interesting experiment.

The Chronicle announced in March that it would launch an expanded business news section with the help of Bloomberg News called Business Report.

Business Report is comprised of regional stories and data produced by the business staffs of The Chronicle and Bloomberg. The collaboration includes content sharing on SFGate.com and the Bloomberg.com Web sites.

Bloomberg’s 50-person San Francisco news bureau coordinates daily with The Chronicle’s news staff to produce the daily business section.

Chan had been multimedia and database editor at the paper from January 2006 to October 2009, when he became technology editor. He had also been technology editor at the paper from January 2005 to December 2005. He gets high marks from reporters and colleagues at the paper for his line editing and for pushing the paper into new media.

Chan talked about the collaboration in an e-mail interview with Talking Biz News earlier this week. What follows is an edited transcript.

What’s been the biggest change for you in being business editor?

In my previous position as multimedia editor, most of my job involved working behind the scenes with the reporters and editors on various online features. I rarely left the office.

As the business and technology editor, my role requires far more interaction with the public, meeting with companies, CEOs, VCs and getting a firsthand sense of what’s going on. It’s probably the best part of the job. The Bay Area business world is infinitely fascinating.

What does the arrangement with Bloomberg in providing content mean to the paper’s coverage?

Bloomberg, with its tremendous resources, covers a lot of territory. By relying more on their coverage for certain things, it allows our staff to focus their energies elsewhere.

Have there been stories that they did that your staff would not have been able to cover? What kind?

The San Francisco Bay Area is home to so many high-profile companies. Beyond Google, Apple and Facebook, which generate a lot of news, there’s Cisco, Chevron, HP, Gap, Wells Fargo, Electronic Arts, Charles Schwab, and the list goes on and on. It takes a big staff to cover all of these companies. Bloomberg has that.

How has the staff reacted to sharing their space with Bloomberg?

The reaction has been positive.

Do you feel like the business content is now better than a year ago? In what ways?

Yes, I do think it’s better today. This partnership has allowed us to cover more ground and provide more localized business content. Just last week, a reader e-mailed me congratulating us “on bringing back a superb, stand-alone, business section of the Chronicle.” I’ve received similar feedback over the past year.

What areas would you still like to see improvement?

Business and tech news is so competitive. I was at a Facebook news event months ago, and I counted about a hundred journalists there. And we know at Apple events, it’s an even greater number. So it’s very important that we differentiate our coverage in a meaningful manner and pick the smartest angles.

What have been some of the biggest accomplishments for the business news staff in the past year?

Last year was about building our credibility as a business section. That isn’t an easy goal when most newsrooms across the country are shrinking, or, at the very least, not growing. The hard work of our editors and writers, coupled with our Bloomberg colleagues, helped us to produce a new and improved section that is more noticed today.

Some people believe that dailies have done too much cutting with business news in the past few years. What’s your take?

You know what I’m going to say.

Who do you see as your biggest competition in the Bay area and why?

I don’t see any one entity as our biggest competition. I see numerous entities that are very competitive with specific aspects of our coverage.

Do you think printed stock listings will ever return to daily papers?

No. To my dad’s disappointment.

What can daily newspapers do in terms of business coverage that other media — weeklies, TV, wire services — can’t?

If we’re talking about the form of the content, I think any medium can do just about anything. Newspapers produce video. Weeklies break news on their Web sites. It’s all a matter of where you focus your resources.