Giving Them the Business

Give the media credit. When they make a mistake, they don't just make any half-assed flub. When they get it wrong, they get it wrong.

Take the coverage of a certain Houston-based business. Fortune magazine said it was one of the country's most admired companies. The New York Times called it "a model for the new American workplace." Even after the stock plummeted and the CEO abruptly resigned, its hometown paper, The Houston Chronicle, wrote that "nothing major appears to be wrong at the company."

Enron, this paragon of American capitalism, was soon hurtling toward the largest bankruptcy in American history.

The media's capacity to blow it is nothing new. Reporters have always been better at describing the mess than predicting the accident. Yet the Enron debacle has provided more than a dose of super-sized humiliation for the nation's business press. It's given the public a glimpse of what a lot of people in journalism already know: that the majority of business coverage just isn't very good.

"If you look at most of the 1,500 daily newspapers in this country, and certainly most of the TV stations," Chicago Tribune Deputy Managing Editor Jim Warren said earlier this year, "the reality is that we're basically bulletin boards for corporate America."

Debbie Van Tassel, business editor at The Plain Dealer, puts it a little more politely. "I don't want to blame people in the press for what people at Enron did," she says. "But it does point out that we need to do a better job."

Van Tassel ought to know. For years, the paper's coverage has tended to epitomize many of those problems. Stodgy and uninspired, the business section has long been a conspicuously weak element of The Plain Dealer. While it has attempted to be more lively and aggressive in recent years, critics inside and outside the paper don't strain to point out where the section still lags: a paucity of in-depth and investigative stories, a lack of urgency, a blind spot when it comes to emerging industries.

In short: On most days, it remains unessential, customary fare: "HMI puts ex-CEO on board," "Businesses learn to cater to the elderly," "Glenn Center on guard for hackers."

"They will report on things after the fact and on large industry," says Erwin Bruder, managing director of the Gordian Organization, a business consulting firm in Beachwood. "How many people in this part of the country even know Moen is located here?"

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It's easy to harp, of course. Daily newspapers tend to be like pro football coaches -- the subject of reflexive criticism, the source of constant bitching. Nobody -- at least nobody outside the media -- sits around the water cooler discussing how good they are. In exchange for a monopoly, they become civic punching bags, a bond that binds a city in collective dissatisfaction.

Business coverage has always been a particularly easy target. For years, it was journalism boondocks, the refuge of the deficient and the damned. "The first papers I was at, the business section was always a couple old nicotine-stained guys," says Joe Dirck, a former Plain Dealer columnist. "It was really a backwater in the newspaper."

The economic tumult of the 1970s changed that, but it wasn't until the go-go '80s and '90s that business journalism came into its own. With a sustained bull market and the proliferation of personal investing, business news was no longer just for businessmen. In 1996 alone, 22 personal finance magazines were launched. By 2000, there were an estimated 12,000 business reporters in the nation's 50 largest markets -- a threefold increase in a dozen years.

Still, quality coverage lagged far behind demand. Part of it was simple math. Bodies were needed, and they often came in the form of reporters too inexperienced for more sought-after jobs, positions that don't entail poring over financial reports or interviewing staid executives. People who pursue journalism tend to daydream about Woodward and Bernstein, not Woodward and Greenspan.

Carl Schierhorn, a Kent State journalism professor, says most students want to cover city news or write about the human side of education or health care. "They find [business] somewhat foreboding, that it is simply part of the world they don't understand and therefore are afraid of. And part of it is that they think it's going to be boring. Students don't like boring."

"I was an economics major in college and basically didn't like it," says Miriam Hill, a personal finance reporter who worked for The Plain Dealer for 10 years before moving to The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1998. "I did an internship at a banking trade paper to get econ credits. Having that business experience made me attractive, because nobody wanted to be a business reporter."

Meanwhile, the best talent became hot commodities, like Playboy bunnies with Mensa cards. The result has been predictable: a wide chasm among the best business publications and almost everyone else. Fortune, Forbes, Business Week, and The New York Times are often stacked with well-written, compelling stories. The Wall Street Journal is considered by many to be the best newspaper in America.