Covering the Skies at Home

For business reporters covering a local airline carrier, staying a step ahead of national reporters takes energy and resourcefulness.

"The challenge for us is to keep the ball rolling forward by reporting on things people won't find in The New York Times," said Kyle Stock, business reporter at The Post and Courier in Charleston, S.C.

The advantage of local reporters is that they're constantly tracking the company, not just when a merger piques national media interest. The disadvantage is that the airline with headquarters in their city may be just one of several beats they must follow.

"We try to come up with angles that national papers might miss or that would be appropriate for our readers," said Bill Hensel, airlines reporter at Houston Chronicle, who builds plenty of sources around the country but keeps his final focus firmly on Houston.

Business editors and reporters at the Post and Courier assume most of their readers have already seen the story on cable, national media or online.

Stock, who followed the recent proposed US Airways and Delta merger, said he focused on different scenarios for people in South Carolina if the airlines did merge. Finding strong local opinions was not too hard for Stock because together the two airlines control two thirds of the air traffic in South Carolina.

US Airways lost its aggressive takeover bid for Delta Air Lines when Delta's creditors rejected the $10 billion offer that would have created the nation's largest carrier. Had the bid been successful US Airways vowed to cut 10 percent of flights into and out of the state.

"We cover a lot of the nitty gritty details about what it would mean to the local markets here," Stock says. He addressed what cutting flight capacity would mean to local airports, seats, flight destinations, cost to consumers and employees.

Mary Wisniewski, a business reporter for Chicago Sun-Times, makes it a point to cover smaller local airline stories so that when a bigger story breaks she already has a list of sources to call on.

"Even if you can't break a national story, you can question it and follow-up on it," Wisniewski says.

Her airline stories usually focus on management changes, job loss and headquarter relocation. "It's important to understand that most mergers aren't really mergers -- they're acquisitions."

Sometimes local reporters are willing to cede some ground to national media in order to stay more focused on their forte -- local sourcing.

Dan Fitzpatrick, a staff writer at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, covered the US Airways-America West merger that closed in 2005. Fitzpatrick did not have a lot of Wall Street sources but broke news by mining sources from unions and employees of US Airways, which prior to 2001 employed 13,000 people in the Pittsburgh area.

"It turned out nicely for us," Fitzpatrick said. "A year or two into it we weren't missing anything, and in many cases we were breaking news."

On the other hand, Loren Steffy, columnist for the Houston Chronicle, says papers too often sell themselves short by obsessing over the "local" issue.

"Business doesn't adhere to geography, so papers that commit to business coverage on the one hand, then try to compartmentalize that coverage by hiding behind the 'local' banner inevitably set themselves up for failure," he said.

Steffy, who spent a dozen years covering airlines for Bloomberg News before joining the Houston Chronicle, says he doesn't spend a lot of time worrying if the competition has more resources or reporters. "I want to win, and I will look for the stories that they're missing."

"If you're covering an airline, you've got to tap into its employees globally. Likewise, investors are not going to buy a company's stock just because it's based in town, and of course, passengers fly a lot of airlines."

Steffy writes his stories for the three groups that make up his primary readership -- investors, employees and consumers. "The key to any merger story comes down to the old cliche of following the money."

Deputy Director Jonathan Higuera contributed to this story.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism