Cornell Alumni Magazine

They're two of the most prominent voices in American financial journalism. Former Daily Sun editor-in-chief Peter Coy '79 is economics editor of Bloomberg Businessweek, where he has worked for more than two decades. Andrew Ross Sorkin '99, New York Times business columnist and co-anchor of CNBC's "Squawk Box," wrote the 2009 bestseller Too Big to Fail, an exhaustive analysis of the 2008 financial crisis that was made into an HBO film, which he co-produced; he also edits the Times-affiliated news site DealBook.

In early August, Coy and Sorkin sat down with CAM over lunch in the Times building to discuss their careers and the current state of financial journalism. By lunchtime, Coy had already made a lengthy appearance on C-SPAN to discuss that week's cover story ("Why the Debt Crisis Is Even Worse Than You Think") and Sorkin had broken the news—on television and online—of Kraft's decision to split its grocery and snack businesses.

Cornell Alumni Magazine: How do you explain complex financial concepts to the average reader?

Andrew Ross Sorkin: As simply as possible. Oddly enough, I was probably better at this when I didn't know a lot, because then you're forced to make people explain to you in the most basic terms to the point where you understand every element of it. But when you start thinking you actually understand, it can be dangerous.

Peter Coy: It's true. I find that I don't really understand something until I've written about it, because the exercise of writing forces you to boil and boil until you have it straight in your mind. That, to me, is the most enjoyable part of the job— figuring out hard-to-figure-out things and explaining them to people. The other thing is you have access to really smart people; Andrew and I both work for publications where people will call us back. I get Nobel Prize-winners on the phone giving me tutorials—stuff that I should have learned in college, but didn't.

CAM: How is financial reporting different from any other beat? Or is it similar to, say, sports?

ARS: There's a certain kind of reporting that is sort of like sports. You go to the game, you tell the world what happened; you report on a fire or what the president said today. But business reporting infrequently happens in front of you. It's rare where you get a ringside seat to the board meeting and report on what happened. I think the challenge is to take the reader inside the room—so you can tell the story so that it almost feels like you're watching the sporting event. But it's hard to do that in real life.

PC: Andrew is one of the best at what he just described. You should ask him to tell you the story about how he doped out some of the sequences in Too Big to Fail, the painstaking work of reconstructing those scenes.

ARS: In Too Big to Fail I tried to recreate what happened in every meeting. I would sit with people for hours and ask, "What did you say? And what did he say? And what did she say back to you?" And I'd do this until I'd talked to virtually every person in the room. Then I'd sit in my living room with notes and match the quotes; for the ones that didn't match, I'd call everyone back and say, "There's another person who said you said it like this. And another person who said..." Until I got people to say, "Well you know what, that's actually right."

ARS: A lot of people do return your calls, but often people don't want to talk to you either because the information's too sensitive or they're not interested. In the example Peter is talking about, there was an executive who didn't want to talk to me. Finally I get him on the phone on a Sunday afternoon and say, "Look, I understand you don't want to talk to me, I've talked to your friends, your lawyer says leave you alone, I get it." And then I laid out for him what reporting I'd done. I said, "OK, I have you in [Morgan Stanley chairman and CEO] John Mack's house on Saturday morning at 10:30. You're sitting in the living room on the green couch, eating a chicken wrap sandwich his wife brought you. Your son's lacrosse game started at 1:30, you didn't show up until 2:30, and this is what you said." And there's this very long pause. By the end of the call he said, "I think we should talk." And that's how this happens over and over. The deeper you get in the reporting, the more other people become attracted to talk to you.

PC: Well, the difference is that he's mostly covering Wall Street and finance and I mostly cover economics, although we do overlap here and there. Mine is less about recreating a scene than combing through data, looking for patterns, for trouble spots. I love finding a new data source. Then I'll say, "I still don't understand this," so I'll get some geek on the phone to explain it to me, and some other geek to explain that person's explanation, until I feel comfortable enough I can quote it in an article.

ARS: Peter, I would say you're selling yourself short on one aspect of this, which is the reason why your stuff is as good as it is. Not only do you talk to all the geeks and figure it out, you then use the human drama. If you're writing a mortgage story you might find a banker or someone who just lost their house, and tell the story so it's more accessible. You may start with the numbers, but then you find people.

CAM: How do you maintain relationships with sources that are cordial without being in their pockets? In other words, how do you maintain objectivity while getting people to return your phone calls?

PC: I am impressed with Andrew's ability to do that. He lays into some of these guys he knows he's going to need in the future. So I want to hear his answer.

ARS: My sense has always been that if you approach people openly—explain what you're doing, give them the opportunity to respond, and come at them with an open mind—that even if you come to the opposite conclusion than they do, they will respect you for it. I've had lots of instances where I've called people and said, "I'm about to write something very critical. You are probably going to be very unhappy—or worse. Let's go through any and all reasons why I shouldn't be writing this, or at least tell me your side of the story." The other thing is being balanced overall; if somebody does something good, you acknowledge it, and when they do something bad, you call them out for it. But if you're just giving atta-boys, or if you're just hitting people over the head, nobody will respect that. Does that make sense?

PC: Yeah, I think that captures it. A lot of it comes down to basic journalism practices; you have to make sure your facts are right, and you've got to give people a chance to respond. And you have to pay attention to their responses, even if that means your story changes. I had that happen about a year ago, where I was going to blast this Washington nonprofit that's involved in low-income housing. I thought I had the goods on them—somebody had tipped me off—and I was reporting around them before I went to them; they caught wind, and we talked. So I sat down with the guy, and I realized we needed to kill the story. It was a momentary embarrassment that I'd wasted a bunch of time, but I'm glad that story never appeared.

If somebody does something good, you acknowledge it, and when they do something bad, you call them out for it. But if you're just giving atta-boys, or if you're just hitting people over the head, nobody will respect that.CAM: Speaking of ethics, let's talk about the British phone-hacking scandal. As people who've chosen to spend your lives in this profession, what did you think when you heard about it? Were you surprised? Horrified?

PC: I didn't have a strong personal reaction, because that is so far from what I do that I don't really associate with it.

ARS: I think of the News of the World and the Sun and maybe the New York Post as being in a different business than I'm in. So I didn't have a tremendous reaction, but I wasn't that surprised. I remember years ago having a fascinating dinner with a reporter from the National Enquirer, learning about the techniques they use—getting hotel rooms next to Michael Jackson, paying maids to take pictures of celebrities for them. When I heard what the News of the World was doing, my reaction wasn't in the context of being a journalist but just of, "That's icky."

CAM: Peter, you graduated in 1979, Andrew in 1999—so roughly a generation apart. Peter, are you nostalgic for the pre-Internet era? Andrew, do you have romantic ideas about the heyday of print journalism?

PC: I'm nostalgic for my youth because everybody is, but it wasn't better back then. At the Daily Sun, I used manual typewriters to write my editorials. If you rewrote a paragraph you'd have to type it on another piece of paper and paste it on; we had to draw brackets when we were centering something. We'd take the articles downstairs after they'd been marked up, and somebody would retype them into a computer to form columns. This was not a better world.

ARS: I started my first internship with the Times in 1995; I was here when the paper was in black and white. I do have romantic notions about that time. I wrote for the Times from London after I graduated. Covering a story, I'd have a full day to call everybody I could find. Now that same story would probably be filed in some form by 9 or 10 a.m., and then you'd file iterations of it throughout the day. There's a tremendous value to that, but I also like the idea of crafting a story and spending lots of time with it. I write a weekly column, and I labor over it; you try to turn a phrase and wordsmith something. But that is harder in this rapid-fire age.

PC: It's a little different for us at Bloomberg Businessweek; because we're a weekly I can spend time polishing something. I do enjoy that. I worked for the Associated Press for nine years, and when I left I said, "I don't want to do this wire service thing again." And when we went on the Internet I felt like I was having flashbacks.

CAM: What about that desire for instantaneous information? How does it affect the way you work, and what are the advantages and pitfalls?

ARS: The good news about this always-on, twenty-four-hour world is that information has become much more efficient. The "first day" story that would have appeared in the Times the next day now appears minutes after something happens. What would have been considered the "second day" story might appear by noon, and the sidebar and other offshoots of those stories might be done by four. The good news is that you can get a lot of information out there. The bad news is that by default, it's hard to get great perspective within hours of something happening. Sometimes you need to take a step back and ask, what does this all mean? And that's what Peter does so well. PC: Because we're a weekly, we have to figure out, "Here's where the conversation is now, here's where it's heading in the next day or so; where can we go that's not going to be completely chewed up by the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal and everybody else who has a higher frequency than we do?" It can be challenging to pull back like that. But it forces you to look for something new to say.

CAM: Time and Newsweek have seen major drops in circulation. Is there a future for the newsweekly?

PC: I think there is—but if it were just my opinion it wouldn't matter. Bloomberg decided there is, and has the money to back it up. We were losing money when we were acquired from McGraw-Hill in December 2009, but Bloomberg has deep pockets and can afford to keep us afloat while we rebuild circulation and advertising. That's the business case; the editorial case is that a lot of people enjoy a weekly frequency. It's closer to the news than a monthly but less frenzied than a daily.

CAM: How does the blogosphere affect what you do? Does it make your jobs harder? There's so much information out there— but also a lot of misinformation.

ARS: Financial journalism was already a remarkably efficient industry. There were thousands of people going after this news because there was money to be made in it, way before there were political blogs, arts blogs, or sports blogs. I would say the blogosphere has made it even more efficient; when there is bad information in the market, it is corrected remarkably quickly. And the blogosphere has added some new voices. There are business people who would have never been caught dead participating in a dialogue who now use it as a bully pulpit; a lot of economists write blogs and have interesting perspectives. I think what some of the established publications can do is to act as arbiters, the people who sift through it and figure out what's right and what's not.

PC: Overall, it makes my life a lot easier. It's a great reporting tool. When I'm working on a story, I have an RSS feed of thirty or forty blogs and I scan them to see if anybody's been writing about this. Because, as Andrew said, things move so quickly now; one person will throw something out, somebody else will respond to it, and within a few hours the state of thinking on the subject has moved pretty far. If you try to figure it out all by yourself, you're not taking advantage of the hive mind.

CAM: What about TV? Peter, you're appearing on TV twice today; Andrew, you're on CNBC every morning. What do you like about it?

PC: Frankly, I do it because my employer wants me to, because it gets our magazine out there. On C-SPAN this morning, they kept showing the cover of the magazine, quoting from my story—it's every reporter's dream. The hard part, on C-SPAN in particular, is fielding questions. This morning, some guy who runs a Quiznos in Michigan called in, and he started ranting about how "these fellows want free potato chips with their order, and that offer's over," and he started swearing. Then you've got people calling in—what was it?—yelling about [anti-tax activist] Grover Norquist. What am I going to say about Grover Norquist? But it's good for Bloomberg, and it's good for me too. It's more likely that people will call me back because they saw me on TV.

I worked for the Associated Press for nine years, and when I left I said, 'I don't want to do this wire service thing again.' And when we went on the Internet I felt like I was having flashbacks. CAM: How different a skill is it to work in TV versus print?

ARS: I've enjoyed experimenting with different forms, whether it's writing in the paper, writing a book, dealing with film, or doing TV. I've found that TV is another fascinating, very different medium. It's obviously more instantaneous; there's a lot of thinking on your feet. You're not only trying to get an answer, you're trying to get an answer quickly. For someone like me who's focused on Wall Street and mergers and acquisitions, it's allowed me to stretch myself. And also, I think Peter's right; there is a personal connection on television that I'm not sure ever truly happens in print, in that viewers see you and think they have some relationship with you. There's tremendous value to that, when you become their trusted source.

PC: A lot of people won't even know who wrote an article; they don't look at bylines. But you can't not look at somebody's face. Print people tend to hate the fact that every survey shows that TV is more trusted as a news source—but that's the way the world is. People trust the ones they see.

ARS: I do, probably as a function of "Squawk Box" or back when I went on "Charlie Rose" or all the promotion around Too Big to Fail two years ago. If someone says, "Hey, love your book," or "Love reading you," it feels great. I've had a couple of awkward encounters where someone comes over to you and you think you should say hello to them because you know them, but you don't, and then you don't really know what you're supposed to do.

PC: I don't get recognized because I'm not as famous as Andrew. But that's a problem for another day.

CAM: Andrew, what was it like to have your book made into an HBO movie starring the likes of William Hurt and Paul Giamatti?

ARS: I mean, amazing, overwhelming, crazy. It's one of those things where you pinch yourself.

CAM: You have a cameo, right? You're a reporter in a White House press briefing?

ARS: I think that there's actually going to be a long, viable journalism business. Do I think it's going to exist like a magazine or the physical newspaper does? Not necessarily. But I think that's fine. PC: I feel the same way, and a few years ago I was pessimistic. People think that if the current exemplars are fading away, the business won't be there. But it's growing in new places, like furry little mammals replacing the dinosaurs. And unlike in biology, some of the dinosaurs are going to transform themselves and continue on.

CAM: In terms of an economically viable system, how do you feel about online paywalls like the one the Times established this year?

ARS: I'm a believer in the model. What I think is smart about how we've approached it, not to sound like an advertisement, is that it's a permeable wall. Readers like to go to the newsstand and flip through the paper before buying it, so I like the idea that you get twenty articles for free and then we say, "Enough already." It's like getting the tsk-tsk from the man at the newsstand after you've been standing there too long.

ARS: Exactly. So I think that the approach is the right one, and it should help us economically over time. It's probably too soon to cheer aloud, but all signs are in the right direction.

CAM: Given that, what advice would you give to the Cornell student who asks, "Should I go into journalism?"

ARS: It's still a tough business. But if you love it, and you have a passion for it, you should do it. The most successful people I've encountered in journalism are people who from day one loved it, breathed it, lived it. You know, I always say I haven't worked a day in my life. I think this is one of the coolest things you could ever do.

PC: Yeah, I agree. I said, "They're going to pay me to do what I've been doing for free here at Cornell all these years?"

ARS: You get paid to be curious, to ask questions of some of the most interesting people in the world. Occasionally, a TV segment or an article can actually have influence, can change the narrative of a discussion or even the national conversation. On television especially, I've seen the market react to something said on CNBC literally instantaneously. Same for the Web.

PC: The curiosity, yes. But the part that makes it different from, say, being an investigator is then you get to write about it, and that to me is equally pleasurable.

CAM: Speaking of curiosity: is there a question you've always wanted to ask each other?

PC: I want to ask Andrew how he got the scoop on Kraft, but he won't tell me.

ARS: You've got to be awake at five o'clock in the morning. It's where the action is.

ARS: I have a question for Peter. Do you think that Cornell University—your academic career—set you up to do what you do today?

PC: No, clearly not. I used to joke that I was an Ithaca newspaper editor who was taking classes at Cornell. I took some great classes, but I probably didn't suck as much of the juice out of Cornell as I could have if I'd really been a full-time student. If I had to do it over again, I might have majored in econ instead of history. I wish I'd taken more econ, more statistics. Maybe a little computer science.

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written by Robert C Gray, November 03, 2011

This conversation steps over a couple of interesting semantic confusions that I'm ready to accept that both the interviewees and most readers will be sure I'm totally wrong about.
The first is the over arching loss of the distinction of investing from speculating in virtually all of America's financial conversation. It is a semantic mess that subsumes FINRA, the financial press and the SEC and especially the community that holds themselves to be THE experts. They do not want you (or themselves) to understand the truth that without a dividend or yield, all you have is a speculation, by a speculator, speculating. They do not want you, as a buyer of equities and assets that you are mostly a speculator hoping for a "Mr Market" higher price somewhere out in the future. I've already had several of the most prominent financial writers, and senior industry executives be sure I am wrong. But unfortunately I am not. Consider the impacts if it were illegal to call a speculation an investment.
The other distinction stepped over is that between journalism and propaganda. We have increasingly moved to a context where writers advocating a position, still claim journalism as their profession or sometimes claim advocacy-journalism. No, it is properly propaganda and propagandist. And when confronted with the proper semantics, they are quite non-linear as a self-image does not hold up to the reality of their actions and behavior.
CAM is an adjunct to the "academy," where there is the possibility of a higher standard of discourse. I invite the interviewees and CAM editors to speak/write to the issues raised.

A conversation with financial journalists Peter Coy '79 and Andrew Ross Sorkin '99

By Beth Saulnier

Worth a Closer Look