Ten current fundamentals of the business press

Dean Starkman of the Columbia Journalism Review writes that with the current upheaval on Wall Street and the business world, there are now 10 fundamentals that the business press must understand and address.

Here are a few:

1. Your beat just blew up.

From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs. If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?

The business press purports to cover business and nothing so closely as it does Wall Street. This is the area business reporters claim to understand. This knowledge is what separates a business reporter from other kinds of reporters. It is why there is a business press. So the beat covered by many publications and thousands of reporters and editors has collapsed.

2. To say, “your beat just blew up� is not to assign blame. It isn’t the end of the discussion but only the beginning.

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