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Show Me the Money Show Me the Money is the definitive business journalism textbook that offers hands-on advice and examples on doing the job of a business journalist. Author Chris Roush draws on his experience as a business journalist and educator to explain how to cover businesses, industries, and the economy, as well as where to find sources of information for stories. He demonstrates clearly how reporters take financial information and turn it into relevant facts that explain a topic to readers. This definitive business journalism text: • Provides real-world examples of business articles; • Presents complex topics in a form easy to read and understand; •Offers examples of where to find news stories in SEC filings; • Gives comprehensive explanations and reviews of corporate financial, balance sheet, and cash flow statements; • Provides tips on finding sources, such as corporate investors and hard-to-find corporate documents; and • Gives a comprehensive listing of websites for business journalists to use. Key updates for the second edition include: • Tips from professional business journalists provided throughout the text; • New chapters on Personal Finance reporting and covering specific business beats; • Expanded coverage of real estate reporting; and • Updates throughout to reflect significant changes in SEC, finance, and economics industries. With numerous examples of documents and stories in the text, Show Me the Money is an essential guide for students and practitioners doing business journalism. Chris Roush is Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in business journalism and founding director of the Carolina Business News Initiative, which provides training for professional journalists and students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has authored two books on business journalism: Show Me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication and Profits and Losses: Business Journalism and its Role in Society. Roush received the Charles E. Scripps Award for the Journalism Teacher of the Year in 2010, awarded by the Scripps Howard Foundation in collaboration with the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Communication Series Jennings Bryant / Dolf Zillman, General Editors Selected titles in Journalism (Maxwell McCombs, Advisory Editor) include: Real Feature Writing Aamidor Communicating Uncertainty Media Coverage of News and Controversial Science Friedman/Dunwoody/Rogers Professional Feature Writing, 5th Edition Garrison Taking it to the Streets Qualitative Research in Journalism Iorio Twilight of Press Freedom The Rise of People’s Journalism Merrill/Gade/Blevens Public Journalism and Public Life Why Telling the News Is Not Enough, Second Edition Merritt Reviewing the Arts Titchener Show Me the Money Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication Second Edition Chris Roush First published 2004 by Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. This edition published 2011 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2010. To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk. Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2004 Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. © 2011 Taylor & Francis The right of Chris Roush to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roush, Chris. Show me the money : writing business and economics stories for mass communication / Chris Roush.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Journalism, Commercial. I. Title. PN4784.C7R68 2010 070.4′4965—dc22 2010032546 ISBN 0-203-84824-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN13: 978–0–415–87654–4 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–87655–1 (pbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–84824–1 (ebk) Contents Foreword vii Preface ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Business Journalism is More Fun than You Think 1 2 Public and Private and Ethics, Oh My! 21 3 It’s the Economy 43 4 The Beat Goes On 71 5 People’s Money is News 87 6 The Ins and Outs of Company News Stories 105 7 Let’s Make a Deal 129 8 Wall Street Meets Main Street 151 9 Financial Numbers Can Be Your Friend 181 10 The Corner Office 207 11 Small in Size, Large for News 231 12 No Profits, but Lots of Money 253 13 Headed to Court 277 14 Bubble, Bubble, Real Estate is Trouble 303 15 Government Issue 325 16 The Web Makes it Easier 359 Glossary 373 Index 385 v Foreword ALEC KLEIN Professor, Medill School of Journalism Northwestern University So there I was, hunched over my desk at The Wall Street Journal, feeling a bead of sweat seep into the collar of my well-pressed, button-down Oxford, and I knew this was the end of my career. It was in the late 1990s, and I was on a conference call with scores of Wall Street analysts and reporters throughout the country, listening to IBM talk about its latest financial results. This presented a problem. I didn’t know anything about IBM. I didn’t know the first thing about com- puters; I had never owned one. Worse: I knew little about finances. Somehow, I had been hired not long before as a reporter at the nation’s leading financial paper; evidently they liked my reporting and writing even though I couldn’t tell a balance sheet from a bed sheet. And now I was assigned to write this story—a lead news piece—for the next day’s paper. I took inventory: IBM officials on the call were intoning about what sounded like financial hieroglyphics. I was so befuddled that I hadn’t bothered to jot anything down. I glanced at the clock. Not good. Precious minutes were ticking to the deadline, and, suddenly, I imagined tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal: a big gaping hole where my article was supposed to be. As soon as the conference call ended, I dialed a Wall Street analyst and asked him to explain what had just happened on the IBM call. The analyst rattled off something to do with “P&L.” “What’s ‘P&L?’” I asked. Long pause. “You don’t know what ‘P&L’ is?” the analyst asked in utter disbelief. I professed ignorance, and he explained that “‘P&L’” stood for “‘profit and loss’”—one of the most basic financial terms known on the planet—and then, no doubt, considered canceling his subscription to The Wall Street Journal. For my part, I only wish I had had the benefit of a good foundation in financial reporting. I only wish I had had the expertise of someone like Chris Roush, the Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Scholar in business journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I only wish I had read an esteemed book like his Show Me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication. This book, had it been around back then, would have spared me a good deal of humiliation. Even more, the book would have given me the critical tools that all financial journalists and students of business journalism need: a deep understanding of important business and economic concepts, before sitting down to write about them. vii viii • Foreword This textbook covers the essential landscape, such as the basics of a company’s financial report- ing, mergers and acquisitions, private firms, nonprofits, bankruptcy court, real estate and regulatory agencies. These and other covered topics are not just a matter of theory. Never before has financial reporting so dominated the news here and abroad. It’s not just that untold people have their retirement savings tied to the vicissitudes of the stock market or that paychecks and college tuition are increasingly entwined in the ups and downs of the global economy. It’s that business reporting touches on the very foundation of our society: a democracy built on the idea of a free market. It isn’t enough, though, to understand basic concepts. Not anymore. I began to appreciate that when I left The Wall Street Journal to become an investigative business reporter at The Washington Post in 2000. There, I conducted a yearlong investigation of AOL’s takeover of Time Warner, obtaining hundreds of confidential documents that demanded I grasp issues involving not just the arcane math of Wall Street, but accounting and legal matters. The end result: I wrote a series of stories showing how AOL secretly inflated its revenue to pull off the largest merger in U.S. history to create the biggest media company in the world. Now, as a professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, I teach students in my business reporting class to learn the fundamentals—profit and loss among them—and then to dig further into financials. I want them to be better prepared than I was so they won’t find themselves sweating on deadline. It’s good to know that, with this comprehensive textbook, there is a ready guide to help business journalists of the present and future navigate the fascinating and complex world of business.

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