Most Business Editors Find News Reporters Unprepared

Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 2004 by Pardue, Mary Jane

Nearly all business editors agreed that an accounting class for journalism majors was needed while almost all agreed that training reporters to understand financial reports was important.

In 2002, the nation watched as top corporate executives from the likes of ImClone, Tyco, Adelphia, Enron and Rite Aid were led from plush office suites into courthouses to face charges in corporate financial scandals. Announcements of financial investigations at WorldCom, Citigroup's Salomon Smith Barney, Computer Associates International, AOL Time Warner and Global Crossing Ltd. became front page news1-all at a time when a national recession had slashed newspaper revenues and had left many business editors at the nation's dailies with smaller staffs. Covering the barrage of breaking news was difficult enough, but business editors were facing another problem. Some reporters on their staff were ill prepared to cover complex corporate financial stories.2

By the end of the 2000-2001 academic year, more than 38,000 journalism and mass communication students had taken home bachelor's degrees, about the same number as the year before.3 Many of those graduates in 2002 found themselves at the nation's daily newspapers where reporters were covering top corporate executives embroiled in corporate accounting scandals. But business editors said the new hires, who were often recent journalism graduates, lacked the skills necessary to analyze corporate financial reports.

This survey was designed to measure how business editors rated the preparedness of new reporters to cover corporate financial scandals and to assess their views on the need to have reporters with expertise in reading company financial statements. The goal of the study also was to illustrate the need for improved journalism education, especially in the area of business reporting.

A1987 study of Economic and Business Journalism for the Ford Foundation by the Foundation for American Communications examined how well the print and broadcast media covered business and economic news. The survey of more than 800 journalists and 81 journalism schools found that "the public's need for informed coverage of the economic matters that now dominate civic and political affairs remains measurably and markedly unfilled."4

In 1999, the Media Studies Center of the Freedom Forum released a report, Business Journalism in the New Information Economy, based on discussions of journalists and educators at the Media Studies Center that year. The report noted that the pressure from the rapid growth of the Internet and audiences demanding more business news had forced business reporters to abandon their old practice of simply rewriting company press releases and become better business reporters. Ralph Izard, former director of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University, was quoted as saying, "The public wanted better economic and business coverage, and that is forcing journalists to respond."5

Criticism of journalism education and the call for new methodologies is far from new. Dickson, in his book Mass Media Education in Transition, charts the evolution of journalism education from the Civil War era to today.6 The issue also was the topic of numerous studies and discussions through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st.

In September 2002, Lee C. Bollinger, president of Columbia University, appointed a task force to restructure the university's journalism graduate school.7 Michael Janeway, director of the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University and former editor of the Boston Globe, said in The New York Times that today more than at any time in the past the public needs strong "probing and insightful information" from journalists. Janeway said that while some news organizations do a good job of reporting breaking events from Sept. 11 to Enron, "discerning readers and viewers are right to ask why they aren't reading or watching reports on issues like terrorism or fraud before such stories break, not after."8

Recognizing a need for more training in business and economic reporting, Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism in the summer of 2002 announced plans for new master's programs in business/economics reporting and legal affairs.9 Medill's business / economics reporting program is promising even though it addresses the need for specialty training at the graduate level.

However, despite the rhetoric about new programs and the need to improve journalists' training, an immediate issue remains for business editors and publishers as well as university journalism professors and journalism school administrators-that new graduates are perceived in the industry as ill prepared to cover breaking business stories today because they lack basic understanding of accounting procedures and the ability to analyze corporate financial statements.

Literature Review

No studies were found specifically asking daily newspaper business editors how prepared they thought graduating journalism students are to cover the complex corporate financial news of the 21st century. Similarly, nothing was found to indicate how business editors rated the need for specially trained reporters on staff or to assess their opinions about the requirement of an accounting class for journalism majors.