Simplifying financial news stories

By Jeanna Smialek

Jake Bernstein and ProPublica colleague Jesse Eisinger‘s series on Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis won a Pulitzer Prize for making Wall Street’s role in the financial crisis understandable to a broad audience — and now Bernstein is spreading his ideas about simplifying financial stories.

Speaking at Saturday’s Society of American Business Business Editors and Writers‘ conference in Indianapolis, Bernstein explained how and why to break down complex topics to make tough business stories engaging.

“We just need to be very creative about how we get these stories out,” he said.

Bernstein’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series looked into how Wall Street giants and major firms made the financial crisis worse by manipulating the sub-prime mortgage bond market for their own profit.

The pieces used simple language and graphics to break down complicated ideas and data, and led to spin-off showtune and an “autotune the news” song that drew 2.4 million viewers. Bernstein said those creative methods of story telling helped the story to reach news consumers who might have otherwise missed it.

Bernstein said reporting really complex stories from the point of view of a novice, using simple narrative language in writing and composing multiple drafts can help journalists to simplify a topic. He also said journalists should give readers the opportunity to go deeper.

“Readers need to be able to go as deep or as shallow as they want,” Bernstein said.

Smialek is a UNC-Chapel Hill journalism student attending the SABEW conference.