Coveted Skills

By Chris Roush
August 22, 2008

Stephen Pounds, a longtime business journalist who left The Palm Beach Post business desk last week via a buyout offer, told me he had an interview recently with a recruiter for a large, national bank. “Think I’m ready to be a banker?” he asked.

Across the state, in St. Petersburg, longtime personal finance editor Helen Huntley is leaving the Times at the end of this month to start an investment advising firm with a friend. Across the bay, reporters have left The Tampa Tribune to work for accounting behemoth PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Like Pounds, I have been pondering a question as well, one that I’ve been ruminating as I wonder where all of the business journalists who are leaving the profession are going to work.

My question is this: If people like Pounds and Huntley are no longer good enough for newspapers, why are their skills so valued and cherished in the industries that they once wrote about? That’s screwy.

The answer I’ve come to is that business journalists have certain skills that can be applied to almost any job, and despite what editors and publishers are doing to business sections and business news holes, that means good things for those in the field.

A good business reporter will never have trouble finding a job, whether it’s in journalism or outside, because he or she knows how to read an income statement, a cash flow statement and a balance statement. Business reporters know how to find information about people and companies. They know how to press someone for information that they may not be that willing to give.

In other words, we have skills that are coveted in almost every other industry except our own. Business reporters are smart too, and many of them are beginning to realize the irony of this situation.

The fear I have is that this talent and information drain is going to work against us. Those entering the field won’t be able to tap into the expertise of the Pounds and the Huntleys in their newsrooms because they won’t be there any more. I learned a lot of what I know about business journalism from the older, more experienced reporters in the newsrooms where I worked.

So the next time you see an old-time business journalist wondering about what career is next, ask him or her to stick around in this one just a little longer. We’re not done with them yet.

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