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In: Stories 17 May 2014 0 comments

By Meredith Hamrick

While income inequality may have been on the rise since the early 2000s or even earlier, media organizations generally didn’t talk about it much until around 2011, and we’ve seen a second spike in coverage of the topic during the past year.

A Lexis Nexis search revealed that the term “income inequality” appeared in The New York Times 430 times in 2013, compared to 277 in the previous year. CNN.com articles mentioned the term 79 times in 2013 compared to 25 times in the previous year.

Bloomberg Television transcripts contained the term 141 times in 2013 and just 64 times in the previous one.

What’s more, the term barely got any attention at all before 2011. CNN.com and Bloomberg TV transcripts mentioned it just 10 times each in 2010. The Times mentioned it more frequently – some 46 times in 2010 – but at a rate that still pales in comparison to recent coverage of the issue.

When it comes to coverage of income inequality, it’s difficult to tell who started covering it first.

“Bloomberg’s been covering income inequality for a while, and that’s mostly because people have been talking about it for a while,” said Victoria Stilwell, an economics reporter at Bloomberg. “This is something that’s been written about way before Obama – especially on Bloomberg’s end,”

That may be true for Bloomberg’s print operations, but Bloomberg TV transcripts reveal that the term “income inequality” didn’t receive a single mention in segments during 2007 or 2008.

Business Insider websiteGus Lubin, deputy editor at Business Insider, said that the site posted its first article on income inequality in early 2010 – a collection of charts showing trends in income inequality that would “blow your mind.” The article, in typical Business Insider fashion, contained 15 charts with short, punchy captions. It ended with a chart captioned “If you aren’t in the top 1 percent of American earners, you’re pretty much screwed.”

“In the early days of our website, that was one of our bigger hits,” Lubin said. “In the next couple of years, lots of people would do similar articles.”

Different explanations exist as to why the term has begun to crop up so much more frequently.

“I think it is influenced by politics,” Lubin said. “We [at Business Insider] don’t have a clear political orientation, but we do like to cover things that people are talking about.”

“Part of it is that things really are getting worse; part of this is that we have new research,” Lubin said, crediting the rise of what he termed the “economic blogosphere” for more in-depth coverage of such seemingly abstract and technical topics as income inequality. More of the work of economists and academics is easily accessible online – and they can publish and share their work much more easily, he said.

Josh Boak, an economics writer at The Associated Press, offered a similar explanation, saying that until recently, reporters didn’t have good measurements for looking at income breakdown. “We had the Gini coefficient, but pre-Piketty, we really didn’t have a great way to look at the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent, 0.01 percent of earners,” he said in an email.

Capital in the 21st CenturyThe Piketty reference is Thomas Piketty, a French economist whose most recently released book “Capital in the Twenty-First Century” has topped best-seller lists. In it, he seeks to alarm readers of the dangerous effects that wealth inequality has on social mobility. He suggests an 80 percent tax on incomes above $500,000 in order to level the playing field between those who inherit wealth and those who don’t.

George Washington University economics professor Joann Weiner offered a few potential reasons for the increased media attention granted to income inequality, but she said she thinks that much of the increase in coverage has to do with the recovery since the 2008 economic crisis. She said that many of the most wealthy lost a lot of their investment wealth in the downturn, but they have begun to recover that wealth, so we are again seeing rising wealth inequality.

She also credited the conversation around the 2012 presidential election with increasing media coverage. “During the 2012 election, there was much made of the fact that Romney made a lot of money and he didn’t pay a lot of taxes.”

“Economists have known about this data for a long time,” she said. Weiner also said Piketty’s work has been influential in bringing the issue of income inequality to the public eye.

Henry Blodget, co-founder and editor in chief of Business Insider, has written numerous opinion pieces about income inequality, warning of its potentially disastrous effects on the economy and on the lives of average Americans. Though he’s in a high-level editorial position, he hasn’t hesitated to make his opinions known on the issue. He wrote a 2012 article titled “Dear America: You should be mad as hell about this.”

“Some people call him an idiot or a Marxist; some people think he is spot on,” Lubin said. “He takes a pointed angle to it.”

When considering income inequality, one question that might come to mind is this: How is income inequality measured, and are all economists using the same measurements?

The short answer to that question is that there are several popular ways of measuring income inequality, but nearly all show some increase in the phenomenon in recent years.

The Gini coefficient is perhaps the oldest and most familiar of these measurements, and it is often used to compare income inequality among different countries. A perfectly income-equal society would have a Gini index of zero while a “perfectly unequal” society would have an index of 100. The Gini coefficient is helpful for looking at the large-scale picture, but it doesn’t necessarily capture more subtle patterns.

Piketty famously uses the capital-to-income ratio to determine levels of wealth inequality. He looks at the amount of money that is stored in inherited wealth versus the amount of money that is actively circulating through incomes. When the capital-to-income ratio become too high, he argues, we see a more and more unequal society where most of the money is in the hands of the extremely wealthy.

These are just a couple of ways to look at income inequality – many others exist.

Knowing that there are many different ways to measure and study income inequality raises the question: Do reporters understand all this data well enough to explain it to everyone else?

“These are complex issues, and reporters – myself included – do not always understand them,” Lubin said. “If people make mistakes, they get corrected.”

That said, Lubin insisted that reporters covering the economy are constantly reading each other’s articles and that they learn from each other over time. “On the whole, there are a lot of people in the media that understand this better than they did a few years ago.”

Weiner warned against the kind of press coverage that doesn’t contextualize inequality data well enough and doesn’t deal frankly with the options for fixing it. “I welcome the media coverage, but I think that if you leave it at the 30,000-foot coverage, you’re missing the story.”

She said she thinks that while worrying about income inequality may draw readers, she doesn’t believe it’s worth the amount of attention it receives. “It’s all in the top 0.01 percent – that’s where you get all the fun stories,” she said. “There’s no inequality once you get rid of the tippy top. To me, it’s not worth worrying about.”

It’s not as much fun to write that story though, she said.

“You probably get better reporting in the financial press rather than the popular press,” Weiner said. She used the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and the Financial Times as examples of such financial publications that offer quality coverage.

“Not every reporter can have a Ph.D. in economics like I do,” she added.

Weiner said there is still a lot of controversy among economists as to how growing income inequality will affect the economy in the long term – and whether it makes sense to try to curb income inequality through redistributive programs or other means.

The best argument to reduce income inequality, she said, is that when income inequality gets to be too large, the wealthy may take over the political processes and shape the society into one that better suits their interests.

Boak said that as a reporter he has spoken with economists who span the ideological spectrum and who have different ideas about how income inequality may affect economic growth in the future. “The primary difference of opinion that exists is we don’t really know the consequences.”

Weiner wrote an article for the Washington Post in January titled “Four reasons why Obama can’t do much about income inequality.” In it she cites data from Alan Krueger, Obama’s former chief economist, showing that the rich are seeing their incomes increase at a much more rapid rate than are the middle classes.

She argues that luck – who your parents are – is the biggest factor in determining where you’ll fall in the income distribution. She also notes that fewer people are marrying those with different levels of education. In other words, we see very few couples these days in which one spouse has a college or graduate degree and the other spouse has just a high school diploma. Finally, she cites the increasing cost of a college education as a barrier to social mobility.

The only one of these factors that’s really fixable is the cost of college, said Weiner.

Readers are used to the income inequality coverage now. They’ve been hearing about it for a few years. “At this point you have to be saying something interesting,” Lubin said. He said interesting charts and graphs and an interview with someone who knows a lot about the economy are all features that tend to bring readers to an article.

Most of his articles on the topic come from reading data-laden reports – not from talking to economists, and he tends to target the average American, Lubin said.

Regarding growing income inequality, Boak says he thinks that the American public senses it on the ground level – whether by a failure to get a raise or other means. “I think that the public tends to have a pretty good awareness,” he said. “They know that something’s off.”

Hamrick is a business journalism senior at UNC-Chapel Hill. She will intern at the Triangle Business Journal this summer.

In: Stories 17 May 2014 0 comments

By Kelci Hight

In the last three years, since Elisabeth DeMarse was appointed as the new CEO of TheStreet, the company has undergone a drastic redesign.

Under her direction, the financial news website has overhauled its editorial staff and changed its business staff. The result has been an improved financial performance and a larger presence in financial media.

The company’s portfolio of business and personal finance brands includes TheStreet, RealMoney, RealMoney Pro, Stockpickr, Action Alerts PLUS, Options Profits, MainStreet and RateWatch. Martin Perez and CNBC’s Jim Cramer originally founded it in 1996. Despite the initial buzz, the site wasn’t able to meet expectations.

Then came DeMarse.

Elisabeth DeMarseDeMarse earned a reputation as a cutthroat turnaround specialist after rescuing Bankrate, a personal finance website, from bankruptcy in 2000.

When she left Bankrate after four and a half years, DeMarse had moved the stock from near extinction to a high of more than $50 a share. Since Bankrate, she launched DemarseCo, where she consolidated Internet properties related to education and credit cards. After that, she was appointed as CEO of CreditCards.com before settling on TheStreet.

DeMarse employs many of the same strategies she used in these past endeavors to encourage success at TheStreet.

Last year, she let go of 100 TheStreet.com employees and according to the New York Observer, “took a blow torch” to the entire ad sales department, bringing in a new team from Forbes.

Video Production

Part of the new team is assignment editor and head of video content, Ruben Ramirez.

“One of Elisabeth’s major initiatives when she came to TheStreet was putting resources into building a good video product.” Ramirez said. Recently, the company built a new state-of-the art studio that includes live video capabilities.

“When you’re in an environment like we’re in, where content is ad supported, video is the last place you can get a lot money for ads,” Ramirez added. The company makes around $30 to $40 each time a video is viewed.

Currently, he produces about 30 videos a day between TheStreet.com, MainStreet.com and TheDeal.com, but by the end of the year, he hopes to be putting out 60. The videos extend across 13 channels, including Cramer On Demand, and aim to cover compelling financial news, like stock market commentary and interviews with high profile executives. The studio’s Wall Street location makes it easy for CEOs to stop by on their way to the New York Stock Exchange.

When asked how he balances the content on each site, Ramirez explained that it was easy because each site had its own personality. TheStreet.com covers market-focused stocks and trends, while Mainstreet.com consists of more personal financial advice, such as strategies for paying student debt or getting a loan for a car. Premium site, TheDeal.com, focuses on institutional mergers and acquisitions, but without the advertisements.

Ramirez is especially excited about the company’s increasing attention to the development of mobile and tablet applications. TheStreet understands the importance of media consumption through mobile devices and application development is yet another way for TheStreet to stay ahead of the curve.

“We’ve taken TheStreet’s deep editorial content, videos, data and tools and packaged them into two powerful iPad and iPhone apps,” said DeMarse in a statement. “They are the perfect balance of substance and style, setting us apart from other financial news apps. These apps are a terrific leap ahead, and users can expect a regular stream of updates going forward, including new apps for Android and BlackBerry, as well as fully integrated access to our leading paid subscription services, all in one intuitive platform.”

She added that apps for Android and Blackberry would be available soon.

Enhancing video and creating mobile applications are just some of DeMarse’s many tactics to bring visitors to the flagship site and subsequently entice potential advertisers.

THESTREET, INC. IPAD AND IPHONE APPAdvertisers are content with paying more in order to reach an audience characteristic of the one TheStreet appeals to. ComScore, an independent Web measurement company, ranked it first among financial media websites for delivering the difficult-to-reach mass affluent demographic. TheStreet readers also ranked first in household income over $100,000 and second in portfolio value of more than $1 million.

TheStreet.com advertisers include WisdomTree, Oppenheimer, TradeStation, Spider, Prudential, Schwab, BlackRock, Emirates, and more.

Ramirez said that his typical viewer has an investment portfolio and money to spend. He called TheStreet.com, “ESPN for financial news junkies.” Ramirez is always working to make sure his audience knows the latest stats for financial news, through video when he feels the content lends itself that way.

“Once news is old, it’s not valuable,” he added.

TheStreet announced in January that it would also be sponsoring the public television series ‘Nightly Business Report.’ Tyler Mathisen and Susie Gharib produce the CNBC show. Having TheStreet’s name on the business television program will further aid DeMarse’s efforts to stay ahead and gain attention.

In addition, TheStreet takes advantage of social media engagement on multiple platforms, like Twitter and Facebook.

DeMarse emphasized the new editor in chief, Janet Guyon’s, experience in digital journalism.

“The digital journalist of today must be skilled at doing video, social media, and incorporating search engine optimization, as well as developing sources and writing stories. They need to have charisma, as well as content. Janet is a true digital journalist and editor with a strong history in real-time financial markets and business coverage.”

Managing talent

Part of the redesign involved putting together a multi-faceted team of contributors.

“Elisabeth’s focus was on having a true multimedia newsroom. Everyone has to know how to write, do video and be good at social media,” Ramirez said.

In March, the company announced that it would be paying contributors based on page views.

A contributor that receives 20,000 page views for an article in a seven-day period will be paid $20. One that receives 40,000 page views for an article in a seven-day period will be paid $40. And a contributor that writes an article that receives 60,000 page views in a week will be paid $50.

As the page views increase, so does the author’s check.

DeMarse wrote, “Our goal is to attract smart, influential writers, analysts and money managers to augment the work of our newsrooms, and who want to be a part of our mission. This is an important initiative personally led by Jim Cramer to attract the best and brightest stock minds to join our publisher platform.”

Brad Thomas has been a contributor for TheStreet for nearly three years. He also writes for competitors, Seeking Alpha, Forbes.com, The Motley Fool and The Commercial Observer. He says TheStreet isn’t the only site paying him based on page views.

The pay isn’t much, he says, “but it’s a great way to build a platform.” Thomas said his writings on TheStreet.com have helped him gain credibility and promote his newsletter, The Intelligent REIT Investor.

“Most of my subscribers come from articles that I have written,” Thomas said.

“I write frequently because it gives me a competitive advantage in research and also because it helps me build credibility. I write about companies with ‘wide moat’ so I suppose I should also write with a wide moat based strategy.”

Some feel that TheStreet keeps too many writers on its payroll, but recruiting contributors is part of DeMarse’s goal to deepen coverage of markets and expand breadth of topics.

Subscription services

Along with collecting apt talent, DeMarse has strived to increase the profitable subscription aspect of the site. At the end of the third quarter in 2013, subscription services accounted for $11.4 million, making up 80 percent of TheStreet’s total revenue.

Herb Greenberg has been a financial journalist for more than 30 years. He recently left CNBC to rejoin TheStreet after 16 years, thanks to the site’s willingness to work with him on a subscription Herb Greenbergproduct. He writes a daily blog for TheStreet’s main free website and contributes to Real Money’s “Columnist Conversation” column, but his main focus is his position as editor of Herb Greenberg’s Reality Check.

Reality Check is a subscription newsletter designed for institutional and sophisticated investors interested in identifying issues that may impact their investment process. Subscribers receive a constant stream of information about businesses and opportunities that have the potential to benefit their investment capital.

When asked how he persuades readers to subscribe, Greenberg said that the process is in transition to TheStreet’s “The Deal” organization, which is more institutional in nature.

As Reality Check aligns itself more closely with The Deal, Greenberg says, “Sales will transition from ‘free trial’ classic retail marketing to an active knock-on-door selling.”

The Deal is a media company, which coincidentally, covers the mergers and acquisition market. The acquisition of The Deal in 2012 was one of DeMarse’s first actions as CEO and it proved to be a good one. Moving the M&A magazine exclusively online helped to generate interest in the subscription part of the site. In 2011, 8 percent of subscribers were acquired via the free site. By 2013, it grew to 33%.

“While many of our competitors have struggled with the shifting sands of online advertising, we have refined our free site as an acquisition funnel for our subscription newsletters,” DeMarse said in a conference call. She noted that TheStreet has a competitive advantage due to dual monetization of the audience visiting the flagship free site.

The type of audience TheStreet attracts is less price-sensitive and more willing to pay for information that provides realistic, actionable advice. According to Greenberg, business journalism’s audience is more receptive to paid services than other online media divisions.

“As making money in media is being hashed out, part of the equation is and will be premium-priced products that are not commodity in nature and add a perceived level of value. Business and investment journalism is a natural for premium-priced products,” Greenberg said.

TheStreet also acquired DealFlow Media Inc. The financial newsletter and database company includes The DealFlow Report, The Life Settlements Report and the PrivateRaise database.

The integration of The Deal and Dealflow Media has led to a generous rise in revenue for TheStreet’s subscription services.

DealFlow founder and former CEO, Steven Dresner, said in a statement, “The combination of our leading small cap finance content with The Deal’s M&A reporting is a natural fit. TheStreet has used The Deal’s content as a growth platform to help increase revenue from subscription and licensing services.”

The future

When DeMarse first stepped in, Cramer warned the new CEO that TheStreet would be “a complete mess,” but that only seemed to inspire her and 2013 proved to be a much better year for the company.

In March, the site reported a fourth-quarter profit of nearly $213,000 compared to a loss of $2.2 million in the same quarter of 2012. The number of paid subscriptions was 78,400, an increase of 20.9 percent from the prior year. The company reported revenue of $54.5 million total, a 7.4 percent increase. The net loss for the year was $3.8 million compared to a net loss of $12.7 million the year before.

Hight is a business journalism major at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication

In: Stories 17 May 2014 0 comments

By Michelle Neeley

In a field that is struggling to continue to maintain profits, weekly business newspapers are thriving and continuing to grow.

For example, the 40 weekly business newspapers that American City Business Journals publishes across the United States have a unique niche and audience that allow them to take creative risks in order to continue bringing in profits and expanding the company, while daily papers across the country are limited and sometimes forced to downsize.

“The first insult that came to daily papers was the deterioration of the classified ad business. For many dailies, that used to be about half of their revenue and Craigslist and other sites just killed it,” Emory Thomas, chief content officer of ACBJ, said. “We were never reliant on classified ads — we had some categories of smaller niche ads, but really they were not like the classified listings that daily papers had.”

Free from a huge loss in classified ad revenue, ACBJ was able to take more risks and innovate to adapt to the increasingly digital-centric world.

Local business journals are not faced with the same challenges as local daily papers because they have a unique niche in the market that actually has the potential to help reader make profits.

“The concept is pretty much the same for everybody; you provide the local markets with local business news,” Chris Katterjohn, former publisher of the independent Indianapolis Business Journal, said. “The coverage that businesses get in local daily newspapers is pretty negative.”

Since business journals are aware of their audience and what their audience reads their publication for, they are able to cater the information they provide to that specific audience.

“In some ways, the world favors more focused publishers. It’s hard to be all things to all people,” Thomas said of business journals.

The typical audience of a business journal is also a factor in the success of a journal. The average print reader of an ACBJ paper is college educated with an average income of $279,000, ACBJ manager of editorial operations, Beth Hunt said in a lecture at UNC-CH.

Readers of business journals learn about other businesses in their area and are able to connect with companies and individuals that would be advantageous to work with.

American City logo“There is an explicit utility to using a business journal. It’s not just for the general sense of personal edification, it is really a truly useful, practical tool for your business,” Thomas said. “You can literally make money by using this publication to the fullest. It is well worth the investment you put into it.”

The readers of ACBJ papers are also worth writing for — advertisers want to advertise in ACBJ publications because of the wealthy readers, Hunt said. An average subscription to an ACBJ publication costs from about $90 to $120 per year, which is a small price to pay compared with the potential profit that readers can gain from the information they obtain from the publication.

The value of ACBJ’s readers causes the organization to uphold a high standard of excellence to maintain its appeal.

“Whatever you choose to publish about, you better be the very best, because if you’re fourth best, there is zero reason for anybody to come to you,” Thomas said.

Independent business journals also find the value of wealthy readers worth working tirelessly for. Charlie Crumpley, editor of the Los Angeles Business Journal, said that his publication’s strategy is to cover stories that have not been covered anywhere else.

“It is very important for our readers, when they pick up the paper, not to say, ‘Oh I’ve seen this story elsewhere,’” Crumpley said.

Crumpley has the view that business journals are supplemental reads, and because they augment what the reader already knows, the journal needs to maintain its relevance by not repeating anything that the reader might already know.

Hunt said that readers of ACBJ publications also want news that they cannot get anywhere else, and far enough before an average consumer to be able to do something constructive and profitable with the information. They look for market intelligence and other information that will help them run their businesses better and creatively. In the digital platform, career advice is most profitable, Hunt said. This could be reflected by the fact that a younger demographic is more likely to use the digital product and people who are not yet established in their careers might seek advice.

Even though the younger demographic may not be as desirable to advertisers, ACBJ still sees the worth in gaining their readership.

The company is committed to being relevant to all potential readers of the journals. In an article on TalkingBizNews.com, the CEO of American City Business Journals, Whit Shaw, said that while the company does not plan to ignore the needs of their traditionally print-preferring audience, they are committed to “reaching out to [their] next audience with content that resonates in their lives.”

In order to continue to attract future and current wealthy and prominent readers, ACBJ is implementing a new “digital first” strategy.

In the early 2000s, American City Business Journals launched daily e-mail newsletters, beginning what would become an investment in what they would do digitally in the future, Thomas said. ACBJ has more than 32 million e-mail newsletter subscribers today.

“Some of the most prominent and constant exposure that we have of our brand to our readers is through the e-mail newsletters as opposed to our print publication,” Thomas said.

The exposure that the e-mails provide has helped the company to build substantial digital revenue, even though the newsletters themselves are free.

News journals that are unaffiliated with American City Business Journals have also found success in sending out daily e-mails to their subscribers. Katterjohn said that the Indianapolis paper also began sending out popular e-mail newsletters in the early 2000s and has several thousand subscribers.

Triangle Business JournalAbout a year and a half ago, American City Business Journals started to restructure the organization with a focus on a digital-first strategy of publishing. It is committed to being digitally excellent by breaking new news online and allowing its print product to be an extension of what was already covered digitally. This allows journalists to pursue deeper, more long-form styles of storytelling in the print products.

“They realize that they have already broken the news on their website or in e-mails so maybe they don’t need to reprint it in their print publication,” Katterjohn said of ACBJ’s new strategy.

Thomas said that the transition to a primarily digital publication was non-negotiable.

“The world is digital, if we are not excellent digitally, then we’re toast,” Thomas said.

The company has restructured all of their newsrooms and product. They developed a very detailed playbook of the steps the company needs to take in order to make their transition, Thomas said.

“[The playbook] dictates everything from what our page ones look like to what the ingredients of out print product are and what the purpose, focus and voice of our e-mail products are,” Thomas said.

Thomas said that the change has reinvigorated the company’s newsrooms.

“It’s really critical to be multi-platform — that’s essential. If you aren’t all those places, somebody else will be, and it’s not simple because each one of these places takes a bit of a different focus, a slightly different voice and a slightly different tactic to communicate to the audience,” Thomas said.

He said that reporters must use all the tools available to them and work their beats in such a way that readers will not feel like they know enough about something until they read what you have to say about it. No reporter can write exclusively for print, in order to be as relevant to their readership as possible they need to do digital work as well.

“You can’t be relevant to your readership if you are not digitally good,” Thomas said.

The transition to a digital first strategy is not simple, and many publications are constrained by limited resources. A complete overhaul in the current way of doing things is not always realistic for all publications, including daily papers. They may be led to put what resources they have into maintaining what they have experienced success from in the past, rather than taking a risk by moving ahead of the times.

The scale of American City Business Journals gives it an advantage over independent publications, but some independent publications thrive without the restrictions that come with a top-down structure.

Katterjohn said he believes that ACBJ papers have an advantage in terms of controlling cost, but independently owned journals have the freedom to tailor their format and content to the particular market they serve.

“If we wanted to do something we just did it,” Katterjohn said of the freedom and creativity that came with working for an independent business journal.

“I’m not sure how much leeway or liberty that ACBJ allows the publisher in each market to do things; I think it is probably a little more restricted than the individual papers that are not owned by them,” Katterjohn said.

Thomas said that ACBJ’s scale is also an advantage because each journal is directly linked to other branches of ACBJ in cities across the country that can help them to better cover a topic that is not completely exclusive to that particular area.

Business journals, ACBJ affiliated and otherwise, also have a distinct advantage against traditional daily newspapers in the growing popularity — and profitability — of their social events.

“There is so much digital, so much going on. There is so much impetus for people to sit on their butts in their office and get all their information. Their interpersonal interaction is being lost,” Katterjohn said.

The community that events foster between business people within a particular area is valuable to the individuals that attend the events, and also very profitable for the business journals that put on the events.

Beth Hunt said that 15 percent of ACBJ’s revenue comes from its events. Other than the advantage of direct monetary gain from events, the events also have indirect benefits. Influential business leaders gather for the events for the opportunity to network, and those relationships help to bolster the loyalty and intensity of the audience.

Journalists are also given the opportunity to use the events to build their sourcing networks, leading to better relationships between businesses and business journals. The people written about are the same people who read the publication, who are the same people who advertise in the publication, Hunt said. The journals need to work to continue to please that group of people, but the complication that other publications face from having several different groups to satisfy is eliminated.

Because business journals have a specific focus on a particular demographic, they are able to be more tenacious in reaching them.

“It is important to be relevant and present in all the places that readers are,” said Thomas. “Print is only one of the places only some of our readers are, so if we’re not in people’s in-boxes, on people’s phones, on people’s computer desk at work, in the middle of people’s cities in ballrooms- then every one of those would be a missed opportunity for being relevant to the audience.”

Hunt emphasized the importance of maintaining good relationships between businesses and business journals.

“If we are going to effectively cover the business community, we need to become part of it.”

Michelle Neeley is a sophomore business journalism student at UNC-Chapel Hill.