Sorkin talks Dealbook's changes and business journalism

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

New York Times business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin founded the Dealbook blog and daily e-mail back in 2001, when such dissemination strategies for business news were in their infancy.

Since that time, Dealbook’s readership has exploded — it has more than 200,000 subscribers to the daily e-mail newsletter, and more than 2.5 million unique visitors to its site each month. This past week, the Times announced a major expansion of the Dealbook section of its site and of the staff manning its operations.

The changes included adding a DealBook page to The Times from Tuesday through Friday, and the International Herald Tribune will also feature DealBook content on those days. The DealBook site was also redesigned. Among its recent hires are Azam Ahmed from the Chicago Tribune and Ben Protess from the Huffington Post Investigative Fund.

Sorkin, who is the paper’s main mergers and acquisitions reporter, talked Wednesday with Talking Biz News about the changes while he was driving to a speaking engagement in Fort Wayne, Ind. What follows is an edited transcript.

How does the new Dealbook fit into the Times’ overall business news coverage strategy?

I think that we see an opportunity to really drill down and cover the world of deal making and finance both for that particularly business world, which is not strictly Wall Street, and for regulators, academics, politicians and others. One of the thing that the financial crisis has done has turned many issues that were on the back burner and put them on the front burner in a way that they were never before.

The expansion of Dealbook is to drive that conversation. To have this real-time SWAT team of reporters and editors drilling down on these issues in real time, but also writing broader pieces with context that also appear in the newspaper. It’s the best of both worlds. You get the immediacy of the Internet and the reach and the real estate of the paper.

Is the strategy for Dealbook any different than the strategy for the Times’ business coverage?

I don’t think overall this is a significant shift in strategy beyond just drilling down deeper on one particular part of the world which we consider our backyard. I think this is an evolution from what Dealbook was and has evolved with how the conversation in the nation has progress. The issues on Wall Street are impacting Main Street, and the dialogue has become much more intense, and we’re able to take advantage of a particular audience that we’ve been able to attract.

To me, one of the things that is so interesting about our readership, is that it started out as very Wall Street oriented, and we still have a huge number of Wall Strerters who are loyal readers. But over the last several years, CEOs, and board members and politicians and regulators are coming to the site as well.

And news organizations are scaling back or shifting their news focus. A lot of this is where we see the window opening in a competitive landscape.

Can you explain the decision to add Dealbook content to the printed Times during the week?

That’s largely a function of the remarkable interest that people have in this world, whether they’re in this world or not. It’s just satisfying this appetite.

One of the things that we’re trying to do is very much actually modeled after what you’ve seen the folks at Politico do or the folks at TechCrunch do. We really want to own the story around a particular world and do it in a way that speaks to that community in that language, but also in a way that is accessible enough for readers who aren’t living in this world today.

I don’t consider myself a Beltway insider of any sort, but I go to Politico and it’s accessible enough for me. I have a pretty good idea of what’s going on in that world. In many ways, that’s what we can do.

With an increased staff of 20, what’s your role now every day with Dealbook?

My role is probably constantly evolving and shifting. One of the great hires that we had that I am particularly thrilled about is bringing Jeff Cane back to the paper. Jeff is acting as the managing editor, keeping the trains running on track and coming up with ideas. And we’ve added a number of other editors to the team, including Adrienne Carter from BusinessWeek. My role is part writer, part editor and part cheerleader in chief.

What other sites do you see as Dealbook’s competitors?

All of the terrific reporting that’s being done on the deal world, whether it’s coming from newspapers, blogs, news services. It’s great reporters who have their boots on the ground. It almost doesn’t matter where it’s coming from.

How will the content change with additional staff?

It’s just what we’re drilling down and getting deeper.  It’s not that we’ve added topics, it’s now that we have people on the ground covering these topics in a day-to-day basis. The difference is having great beat reporters. The great beat reporters cover the small stories that become the big stories. That’s where the kernel of news begins. It’s important for us to have peopole focused on their beats diligently.

The other component to this is we have added particular journalists who have remarkable expertise. You look at Sue Craig, at the Wall Street Journal she did a wonderful job of covering Wall Street, the downfall of Lehman Brothers. Having a veteran like that with an encyclopedic knowledge makes a big difference. Jesse Eisinger has a real investigative bent for ProPublica and wrote about the banking crisis at Portfolio before there was a banking crisis. It’s as much about the topics as it is attracting great talent.

Will Dealbook end up behind the Times’ upcoming paywall, or will it remain free to all readers?

The Times hasn’t unveiled its pay wall plans yet, so I can’t speak to that.

Could you eventually see Dealbook as a standalone business news operation, separate from the Times’ business desk?

I think we think that Dealbook is part of and complements and adds to the overall daily report. Dealbook in a way helps feed some of the great ideas you’re seeing in the paper. I see us as complementary and part and parcel with each other. Anything’s possible, but that’s not on the drawing board.

How has business journalism changed since Dealbook started in 2001?

It’s a completely different place in many respects. Breaking news has become a tougher business unto itself. When I first started, the Holy Grail was to publish your scoop in the New York Times, and you’d be able to hold onto it for 24 hours. Now, you have your scoop at 5:02 p.m., and someone will have matched your scoop by 5:05 p.m. In some part, it’s ephemereal.

Breaking news is important, and investors are always interested in new news. But I think there’s more of an appetite now for more analysis. If Dealbook does anything, I hope it does anything, explaining what comes next and how the dominoes will fall.

Aggregation has changed. When I started doing this, I was literally in my pajamas at 4 o’clock in the morning, linking stories all over the Internet. Back then, nobody did that. Blogs didn’t exist. Twitter didn’t exist.

The other thing is just the amount of competition. I still think there is still a tremendous value in the platform of an institution like the New York Times. But that’s not to say a person working a story in their apartment on their own can’t have a big impact. There’s more people chasing this news than ever before.

The last piece of the big shift is the sense and the need to be multi-platform, this idea that you’re going to write the story for your paper or online, and you may send out a Tweet about it later, and maybe you’ll make a companion video or go on broadcast to talk about it.