SABEW Best in Business award winners share strategy

By Sarah Frier

Some of the winners of Best in Business awards explained how they got their stories Friday for the Society for American Business Editors and Writers conference in Dallas.

Phil Mattingly of Bloomberg won an award for his stories on the Dodd-Frank act. During an at least 22-hour meeting, Mattingly and a team of reporters were able to break news throughout.

As soon as the news broke, Bloomberg had a 4,000-word story giving a full overview of the new regulations broken down by industry. A draft of the story was prepared in the weeks before the meeting using context and anticipating the changes.

Fred Schulte, a senior reporter for The Huffington Post Investigative Fund, wrote a series on tax lien sales. After a story on ground rent, someone pointed out to him that he should be looking at property liens.

“At some organizations, editors can sit around in a room and find the best projects,” he said. “But the best stuff comes off a beat.”

He said he also sometimes clips briefs out of a newspaper and puts it in a folder to revisit.

Laura Goldberg and others of the Houston Chronicle won three awards for coverage related to the BP oil spill.

“At first it was not obvious the spill was going to be a major news event,” she said. “Knowing BP, we decided to go big at the beginning. And if it’s nothing, you pull back.”

The Chronicle launched a related site, fuelfix.com, earlier than planned in order to capitalize on the audience for oil-related news after the spill.

Al Scott of the Puget Sound Business Journal, which won multiple awards, said stories came out of the woodwork during the financial crisis. Finding people that lived the stories — like a local family that lost 200 million on local real estate loans — helped people become energized about the pieces.

“We look for stories we all get excited about,’ Scott said. “Once we’re excited, we put in the time to really do it.”

Ilyce Glink, who writes a home equity blog for CBS moneywatch.com, said she follows her instincts to write about real estate in different ways — from celebrity buys to military foreclosures to loan modification. She’s been able to help readers directly.

“I’ve helped people solve their loan modification problems by linking people to resources that they never knew were there as taxpayers.”

Sarah Frier is a business journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill who will intern at Bloomberg in New York this summer. She is also editor of The Daily Tar Heel.