What are your responsibilities? I cover personal finance, plus the local banks and insurance companies (Nationwide is based in Columbus).
What's a typical workday? Generally 10 to 6 - it's not like covering cops or a municipality when things happen at night or on the weekends. My days seem to go one of two ways: work on a breaking story, such as a quarterly report from a big local company I cover or a new set of horrible financial statistics that are announced (foreclosures, unemployment, bankruptcy, stock price plunge) - or, work on a bigger, centerpiece-type story in which I have more time. At The Dispatch - knock on wood - we don't have to crank out as many articles as I have had to do at other papers. This leads to better journalism and a more rewarding job. Yesterday, for example, I wrote a story on the 2008 bankruptcy numbers for Ohio - they were up, of course, and I had to find a couple of experts and someone going through a bankruptcy. Today I started working on a "How to Survive Bankruptcy" story and tried to find different experts. Tomorrow I may be doing something on the foreclosure numbers in Ohio, as I just got an e-mail (literally as I am writing this) from the company that tracks the numbers.
What do you like/dislike about the job? I like learning the new beat. I was never a business reporter until June when I started at The Dispatch and like the challenge of taking what I've learned on other beats and applying it to the business world, which has its own jargon, acronyms, Web sites and insider info. Even after seven months I still have a lot to learn - for example, how to read and decipher an 80-page quarterly report filed with the SEC. It's an endless bunch of numbers - and gives me a headache!
What I don't like is that compared to other beats I'm stuck at my desk a lot more, working the phone, trying to contact experts, rather than getting out there talking to people on the scene. I miss that - and am working on ways to get out of the office and talk to "real" people.
Educational/work background: I got a master's degree in journalism at Columbia and then worked mostly in the Philadelphia area: Inquirer, Morning Call in Allentown, Intelligencer of Bucks County. I have also taught at Delaware Valley College, Bucks County Community College - and came to Columbus to teach journalism at Ohio State in 2006.
What are the skills young journalists need today? I think you need a solid journalism background - the basics of how to interview, gather information and write a news story on deadline - and then learn ALL the multimedia skills. You will also need to learn how to work on three or four things at the same time and get things done faster than is humanly possible, especially early in your career at a smaller paper or news outlet or Web site. Extra skills - a foreign language, computer stuff, juggling - can help.
Any advice to aspiring journalists? I've jumped around from news to sports to arts and back to news and then to business and will probably jump around a few more times before it's all over. I think has helped make me a more versatile reporter and kept me from getting bored, burned out and cynical. OK, I'm a little cynical, but every reporter should be.
Any additional comments? If you're serious about journalism: internships! What I learned at Ohio State is the motivated students who had multiple internships had no problem getting a job when they graduated. Those who weren't as serious about it and didn't write for the school paper and have multiple internships were not as marketable. Be one of those annoying over-achievers - it pays off in the long run.
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