Hal Ritter

Born January 2, 1952, has been AP business editor since 2008. He was business editor of the Times-Union in Rochester, N.Y., and managing editor/Money of USA Today. He has a degree in journalism from the University of Kansas and an MBA from Stanford Business School. In 2000, Ritter was named one of the 100 greatest business journalists of the 20th century by TJFR and MasterCard.

What I’ve learned . . . in 19 years as a business editor (with apologies to Esquire):

Many financial journalists should be doing something else. Of course, you can say that about every occupation.

Those who fall short lack the desire to be the best. If you’re a bricklayer and don’t want to be the world’s best bricklayer, you should find another job.

Good writing is simple. I don’t mean easy. I mean if you write simply, your writing will be good.

Good writing is clear, concise, correct. Clear means simple sentences, for the most part. Concise means no unnecessary words. Correct means no grammar, usage or other mistakes. Few would disagree; even fewer master all three.

If you can’t write well, double down on your reporting. A good editor can shape a great story if the reporting is there.

Bone up on a topic before you start reporting. Become as expert as the experts you’ll interview.

Many expert sources aren’t. They spout conventional wisdom, or say things that are wrong. Don’t be afraid to push them around. Throw their quotes back and make them reconsider. And find expert sources who are.

Every editor has a reporter who tries to mask weak reporting with “fine writing.” Don’t do that to your editor.

If you report deeply, you can write authoritatively.

Every story has two parts – idea and execution. Execution – reporting, writing, editing – may take days or weeks. The idea part usually lasts a few minutes. Stretch it.

Ideas are the lifeblood of every newsroom.

Put every idea to a rigorous reader test. It matters little how much you and your editor like an idea. If readers don’t read your story, you’ve wasted your time.

Put the reader first. Those are four words to live by.

I’ve come to value critical thinking as much as any skill in a financial journalist.

Many quotes in stories are lame. Mostly, we can write better than people talk. A good quote is like the punch line of a joke.

No matter where you went to school or what courses you took, you have much to learn. There are many ways to learn on the job. Take advantage of them. Consider options outside work, such as classes in finance and economics at a university. Or take a break and get an MBA.

Financial statements should be as easy to read as a beach novel. And almost as enjoyable.

If you don’t love numbers, you’ll never make it as a financial journalist.

Read every story you write when it appears in print and compare it carefully with the story you turned in. If you have a good editor, that’s the easiest way to learn.

I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best financial journalists of our time. At two newspapers and The Associated Press. They helped me learn those things.

David Wessel

Born Feb. 21, 1954, is economics editor of The Wall Street Journal and writes the weekly Capital column. He is the author of two best-sellers, “In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic” (2008) and “Red Ink: Inside the High Stakes Politics of the Federal Budget” (2012). He was a Knight Bagehot fellow in 1980-81.

Is doing good business and economics journalism today (a) easier or (b) harder than it was when I started out more than 35 years ago?

The answer is yes.

When I joined the Middletown (Conn.) Press back in (gulp!) 1975,  I realized that we over-covered local government and we under-covered the businesses that employed our readers.

We had a unit of Gulf + Western in the town, so I ordered a copy of its 10-K.  This was the pre-Internet era so it came by mail, pages and pages of it. I think it was about four inches thick.   I never did find a story in there.

Things have changed a lot since, then. The Middletown Press is a shadow of its former self and Gulf + Western is long gone.

But imagine a young naïve reporter plunging into a similar story today.  He or she probably is better prepared for the job; our younger reporters are better educated than my generation was.  The documents, of course, are all on line – and are easily searchable.  So are transcripts of executives’ conference calls with analysts.

With a few minutes on Google, and the reporter easily can find all sorts of relevant perspectives on whatever the local factory makes. With Facebook and LinkedIn, the reporter probably can find half a dozen sources, perhaps people who have recently left the company.

And a wealth of easily available data can be dropped into a spreadsheet – as essential to modern reporting as a notepad was in 1975 – to see things that aren’t immediately obvious and to make charts and graphs that illuminate stories for our readers.

So it’s a cinch, right?  I wish.

First, many of the journalistic enterprises for which we work – print, broadcast, online – are increasingly starved for resources.  It’s harder to find time to learn enough about a company or topic to do the really smart story and report those ‘aha!’ facts.   Second, the complexity of the companies we cover – and the sophistication of their PR operations – has grown faster than the smarts and quality of reporters.  We’re better than we were, but we haven’t kept up.  The failure of the press, with some notable exceptions, to identify and shout about the excesses that preceded the financial crisis is all the evidence you need.

Three, business is global; most of us still aren’t.

Four, when I started out, a lot of business executives thought we were stupid; now a lot of them thing we’re evil or out to get them.  Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes they just don’t like what they see in the mirror we hold up to them.

Some things haven’t changed. Perhaps the most important one is this:  Covering business and the economy isn’t like covering sports.  It’s not a game; it’s real life with real consequences for real people.  And the ones with the most points (aka dollars) aren’t always the ultimate winners or the smartest players on the field.

Linda O’Bryon

O’Bryon is the president of South Carolina ETV, based in Columbia, SC. ETV is the public media network for the state with 19 television and radio stations. She is the founding executive editor of “Nightly Business Repor”t and was one of the two original co-anchors for the program. She was born and raised in Washington, D.C.

Business news is dominated by numbers. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, interest rates, home prices, quantitative easing strategies, and a myriad of financial indices that are reported daily.

But business news is not all about numbers. Early in my business journalism career, I realized that like so many other fields in journalism, good story telling and the people behind the numbers are what provide substance and staying power.

As I mapped out my approach to business news, I often tried to look for the human interest angle. The unexpected. The story behind the story.

The story I found that was most compelling came not from New York or Washington but from Omaha, Neb. It was a story we produced for “Nightly Business Report” in 1994 about Rose Blumkin, better known as “Mrs. B.” At the time I interviewed her, she was 100 years old. She founded Nebraska Furniture Mart, the nation’s largest furniture store under one roof.

Mrs. B came to the United States from Russia when she was just a young girl. She wanted to make a good life for her mother, whom she called “my princess.” She said in the interview, “I came from Russia 75 years ago. I started in the basement. Never lied. Never cheated. Never been a big shot.” It was a story Mrs. B loved recounting with her customers.

And when we caught up with Mrs. B, she was still active in the carpet division of the company she founded. Her agility with numbers impressed her customers. They would come in and tell her the size of the room they needed for carpeting. Without a calculator, she told them how many yards were needed and the price.

Her hard work and drive led to a successful furniture business that was eventually acquired by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett talked about Mrs. B’s great ability to know how to deliver the best value to the customer and to “outwork” everyone else. He said, “She knows what she knows and knows what she doesn’t know. She defines what I call her circle of competence perfectly.”

We visited Mrs. B on a later trip to Omaha, and she was still working at the store, where she continued to use a golf cart to get around the expansive store. Mrs. B died in 1998 at the age of 104.

There are some basics from which we can all draw. Mrs. B’s values of hard work and honesty built the business. She showed that one person can make a difference for any organization. Her facility with numbers was a big factor in her success.

But it was her personal story that was the standout. Numbers are the daily language of tracking business and markets, and we need those numbers. Stories about people provide the fabric and the texture of business news.