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Storytelling that Sticks
By Jeff Bailey

Proxy Digging
By Chris Roush

Savvy Spending
By Jennifer Hopfinger

Takeaways from the Cramer Interview
By Andrew Leckey

Faces of the Crisis
By Alec Klein

Mastering Story Forms

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Successful business writers will employ over a period of years about a dozen tried-and-true story forms. Among them are the trend story, the narrative, and the essay. It takes even the brightest journalists a few years to master these approaches and maybe a bit longer to know just when to use them. Here reporters from The Denver Post (trend), the San Francisco Chronicle (narrative) and The Kansas City Star (essay) show how it’s done.

Click here to send me an e-mail with some great business stories you’ve written or seen. You could see your story touted here as one of the best in the nation.

Note: Each headline contains a link so that you can read the stories online. Some sites will require you to register first. It's worth taking the time.

3 Behavioral economics is moving from theory to policy
Rick Montgomery of The Kansas City Star
Montgomery has a different take on what might turn around bad financial times. He writes a quirky essay arguing that efforts to try to change our spending habits belong more in the realm of behavioral science than economics.

2 Cautionary story of fund manager’s suicide
Susan Sward of the San Francisco Chronicle
Sward recounts the sad story of a perfectionist hedge fund manager who took his life as the market collapsed around him. Newspapers, traditionally shy about reporting on suicides, are having to confront this issue with increasing frequency. Note how Sward and the Chronicle honored the family's request to withhold the method the man used to kill himself and how that missing detail took little away from the impact of her tale.

1Thrifty business on the rise
Kevin Simpson of The Denver Post
Simpson reports that these are boom times for thrift stores in the Denver area. He illustrates in this insightful and practical story how thrift stores have shed their dowdy image and mildewy odor to compete with regular discount stores. For those of us who wonder what happens to our donated goods, he tracks the trail of where things end up. He finds that stores are using creative ways to sell or recycle most donations so that little goes to waste.

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Copyright © 2009 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism