Floyd Norris

Born Sept. 6, 1947, is the chief financial correspondent of The New York Times, where he has worked since 1988.  He previously was stock market editor at Barron’s National Business and Financial Weekly and worked for both The Associated Press and United Press International.  He is the recipient of three lifetime achievement awards in business journalism — the Elliott V. Bell award from the New York Financial Writers’ Association in 1998, the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award administered by UCLA in 2003, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in 2008.

When I became a business journalist in the late 1970s – having gotten a job at the Associated Press despite a lack of experience, let alone expertise, in financial reporting  —  it seemed to me that too much of the reporting consisted of little more than, “He said this but she said that.”

How was the company doing? We quoted an analyst, who was presumed to be objective. Was the stock a good buy? Particularly diligent reporters found a short seller to disagree with the bullish analyst.

There was one shining example to the contrary: Carol Loomis.  Reading her articles in Fortune left me envious.  She didn’t quote some analyst about what a company’s financial statements showed.  She read them and told us what they meant.

Sometimes she figured out tricks companies were using that no one else had noticed, or at least no one had written about. Why couldn’t I do that?

In 1981, I was fortunate enough to get a Walter Bagehot Fellowship at Columbia University’s journalism school.  We were expected to take classes in the business school for a year, and I stayed for another two semesters and earned an MBA.  Accounting, and the games that could be played to make the numbers look better, fascinated me.

After leaving Columbia, I joined Barron’s as 1983 began, and soon took over the stock market column.  The previous writer, who had been at the magazine since 1959, had quit in anger after being passed over for a promotion.

(An aside:  During a taxi ride, I mentioned to Alan Abelson, the Barron’s editor who had given me the column, that 1959 was the year I had gotten out of sixth grade.  “How long were you in?” he replied. )

It was at Barron’s that I was introduced to the wonders of Disclosure Inc.  In those days, the only ways to get a company’s filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission were to go to the SEC reading room, get a company to send their own filings to you (probably by mail) or buy them from Disclosure. That company would messenger documents to you within a day – or within a couple of hours if you paid extra.

Barron’s had an account, and I came to abuse it.  Since I could not be sure exactly what filing would have a crucial fact about a company, why not buy them all?  Piles of paper would appear.  Bills for a single piece of research, which might or might not lead to an article, would sometimes exceed $1,000.  Nobody at Barron’s complained, and I found I could get information for the weekly that no one had published in the dailies.

I learned to read quarterly and annual reports from the back.  The footnotes were where the interesting stuff was buried.  So I would read them first.  I assumed the chairman’s letter was public relations propaganda, and usually skipped it.

I came to The Times as a financial columnist in 1988 and promptly opened a Disclosure account.

I also did something that I had never done before.  I called up a journalist and asked if I could talk to her about her work.  Carol Loomis said yes, and we had lunch.  She stunned me by telling me that before she wrote an article about a company, she read the last five annual reports, cover to cover.

Including the chairman’s letter?  Surely not.

Yes, she said. Those letters were valuable, especially the old ones.  Sometimes a promising new business or strategy was heralded one year, only to vanish without a trace a couple of years later.  Finding out what happened and why could be fascinating.

Since then, I have read those letters as well.

These days, young financial journalists know far more about finance, companies and markets than I did when I broke in.  An SEC filing can be on anyone’s computer screen almost immediately after it is filed, at no cost.

But SEC filings remain an underused resource. Companies release their earnings using news releases, and the actual financial statements can come out weeks later, ignored by reporters.  There are still gems in footnotes.

Hank Gilman

Born July 16, 1952. Gilman was the No. 2 editor at Fortune before leaving at the end of 2012. He spent 16 years at the magazine, including a stint as editor of Fortune Small Business. He was also the business editor of Newsweek from 1991 to 1996 and the assistant business editor and personal finance columnist of the Boston Globe from 1998 to 1991. He won the Lawrence Minard Editor Award from the Gerald Loeb Foundation in 2011.

It doesn’t seem so long ago — well, it doesn’t seem long ago to me — that the business section was the backwater of the daily newspaper. It was the place they sent you when a little zip went off your fastball.

The “business pages,” as we used to call them, were filled with such people — and management was too lazy to do anything about them. It was the Zombieland of journalism.

Of course, there were business magazines and The Wall Street Journal when I left college around 1976 or so. But econ-journalism wasn’t sexy. Not for kids weaned on Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein. Few of us had interest in crunching economic data, writing glowing pieces about fat cats and smoking cigars at the Harvard Club. (Not that I qualified.)

Unfortunately for me, I was an economics junkie. I read The Journal and BusinessWeek in college. Fortunately for me there were forces at work that would make business journalism the center of the universe.

In the 1980s there were three big trends, from my vantage point, that made stars out of business journalists and the publications that hired them.

The personal investing boom gets a lot of credit. The stock market was going crazy in the 1980s when I got into the business. And when the stock market goes up, everyone wants in on the game. For the reader, that meant an insatiable appetite for expert information. For publications, that meant a demand for journalists who could actually dole out that information. (In other words: kinda knew what they were talking about.) For financial advertisers, they needed to get their message out to the masses.

Hand-in-hand with the stock market boom, was the mergers and acquisitions explosion. You had great tales of back-office intrigue, colorful characters and, here and there, some good old law-breaking. Who can forget then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani and his Wall Street perp walks? Leveraged buyouts? Junk bonds? Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken? Great stuff.

Finally, there was the tech boom of the 1980s. IBM, Digital Equipment, the legendary Route 128 technology corridor in Massachusetts were among the icons. Mainframes vs. mini-computers vs. PCs. The young Michael Dell and Bill Gates — barely a PR posse in sight — would descend on the offices of The Wall Street Journal and other publications and tell tales of revolution. You just had to cover this stuff.

The result of all this? In my view, it allowed business journalism to take its rightful place among the politics, sports and entertainment beats. Long-form writing was prized. Business journalists who could also tell a good story were in demand. Daily newspapers from the New York Times to the Boston Globe expanded their business departments and even devoted separate sections to the topic.

Publications such as BusinessWeek hired scores of writers to cover the technology beats. (In fact, in the mid-’80s, it seemed like an arm’s race between the WSJ and BusinessWeek for talent and big stories.) For us reporters, well, we were paid far more than we ever expected when we left college. We could actually become a part of the upper-middle class and not have to marry well to do it.

But the biggest impact of all was that some of the country’s finest journalistic talent gravitated to business publications. At The Journal we had a slew of writers from the Ivies and other top schools with everything from law degrees to MBAs. When I was at The Journal in the mid-’80s, you could literally throw a stick and hit a future Pulitzer Prize winner.

That would never have happened — ever — in Zombieland.

Larry Ingrassia

Born 1952, an assistant managing editor at The New York Times, was business editor for nine years, starting in 2004. Before that, he worked as reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal in various places – Chicago, Minneapolis, London, Boston and New York.

It was 1983, and I was a young reporter for The Wall Street Journal. I was interviewing the president of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, Gerald Corrigan (who would later become head of the New York Fed) not long after he had visited the Iron Range in Minnesota.

After giving a talk there about the economy, he told me, a hand shot up, and a mining union official in the audience asked: “Mr. Corrigan, I got a question for you. Why was M1 down $3 billion last week?”

It was a eureka moment for me: When you’ve got union guys in northern Minnesota asking a question like that, you know that the business pages are no longer just for executives in corner offices. Even local union officials knew that high inflation – then in the mid-teens – was damaging the economy, and having a direct impact on the livelihoods of their rank-and-file members.

Until around then, few people felt that business news was important to them. Yes, there have always been ups and downs in the economy. But outside corporate suites and Wall Street, not many readers paid much mind to economics.

Indeed, I think it is fair to say that – with few exceptions – the business of business reporting was a backwater at many newspapers, often a place to send reporters who weren’t aggressive enough for the national desk or the metro desk or who had performed many years of service and were coasting toward retirement. Newspaper reporting about business and the economy was dominated by The Wall Street Journal, which was considered a niche publication, and was mostly an afterthought everywhere else.

Flash forward to today, and that has changed, and how. The globalization of business in the 1970s and 1980s made economic news of interest to readers who never thought it mattered. For the first time, Americans found that their jobs were being directly affected by competitors overseas. Trade pacts – snore! – became front page news, along with trade deficit figures and the monthly jobs report.

Another milestone that increased interest in business news was financial deregulation. When the government deregulated savings deposits, and allowed people to take their money out of low-interest bank accounts and put it into money-market accounts with much higher yields, the average reader had to get educated real fast. Then there was the advent of 401(k) retirement funds and the shift away from traditional pensions. All of a sudden, a much larger percentage of Americans became direct investors in the stock market – for better or worse, in the unfortunate case for some people.

At times in the last few years, in fact, economic news has dominated coverage, even during presidential elections. Think about the financial meltdown of 2008, or the ongoing European debt crisis. Or how about the debate about health care, which is largely a debate over costs? Then there is technology, a truly global industry that is changing the way we live and work in ways that we are just beginning to understand. When I was a young reporter, there was no Microsoft, no Google, no Facebook, not even Apple. Today they are among the biggest and most recognizable companies on the planet.

No wonder that The New York Times has substantially increased the size of its business news staff in the past 15-20 years, and the fastest growing news organization is Bloomberg News, which itself didn’t exist until about 25 years ago.

My prediction for the next 25 years: More of the same. Global economic competition will grow. Job creation, technological innovation, tax policies, growing income inequality, energy production, retirement – all will be big issues around the world. All in the end, of course, are about money.

To the next generation of business and economic journalists: You’re covering what may be the biggest story of our time. Have at it, and do us proud.