What biz wires can teach the rest of business journalism

The best business journalists at the Associated Press are those that can be both reporters and editors at the same time, its business editor said Saturday.

“Our reporters will be out in the field gathering news and writing stories, but they will also have a desk assignment” later in the week or the next week, said Kevin Noblet, the AP’s business editor, at the fall Society of American Business Editors and Writers conference in Chapel Hill, N.C. “They hate it.”

But, he said, it makes the reporters more sensitive about turning in copy that is cleaner and more likely to be published in newspapers around the world.

Noblet was part of a panel of managers at the main business news wire services that talked at the SABEW conference about what they do that could be applied at business desks at newspapers and other media outlets.

“We’re looking at where we can do on Web 2.0,” said Reuters managing editor Betty Wong, noting that Reuters was the first news organization on the Internet. Reuters has opened a bureau in the virtual world Second Life.

Reuters, which has 2,400 journalists around the world, also has a blog distributor and a relationship with New York University where citizen journalists pitch and develop stories. It hired 140 new journalists in the past year.

Dave Wilson, a columnist at Bloomberg News and editor, said the New York-based wire service tries to think about what stories it knows are going to happen at a certain time, such as earnings releases from companies, and be prepared to get those stories out as fast as possible.

“We try to focus on the stories that people are going to pay the most attention to,” said Wilson. “There is a difference between writing in terms of the target audience and how you approach it. If you are writing for investors, that could mean that you are using their language.”

Wilson said Bloomberg is now more focused on the stories that the owner of a Bloomberg terminal will want. But others are also interested in that type of news.

Added the AP’s Noblet: “We’re not dipping into those deep pockets on the trading floor.” But, he added, the AP still writes many stories from an investor focus.