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Money Talks

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

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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.

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