The Reynolds Center has announced its 2008 fall workshop schedule.
Select a workshop and register from the drop-down menu below.
The Reynolds Center has opened registration for select 2008 free online seminars.
Topics include:
*Intermediate Business Journalism
*Covering Private Companies
*Business Journalism Boot Camp
Business reporters are working around the clock to meet the challenge of reporting on the economic implications of unprecedented devastation caused by Hurricane Katrina.
Questions such as "what the storm will do to the New Orleans economy and how many businesses will leave the city forever" are being raised, said Timothy Boone, business reporter for the Baton Rouge Advocate.
Papers around the region are reporting on how local businesses are dealing with widespread housing issues, hotel room demand and crime.
"There is too much to cover," said Boone. "There are just millions of stories that need to be told and huge over-arching stories."
The financial turmoil includes hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of livelihoods wiped out. Local businesses devastated by flood waters or flattened by battering winds have left people with no jobs or income. In many locations there is no retail infrastructure for commerce to take place.
Like many cities not directly hit by Katrina, Baton Rouge has been receiving many evacuees. This mass exodus of residents is already affecting business in the Louisiana capital.
"Baton Rouge has become the home for a lot of refugees," Boone says. "Already, displaced businesses are leasing out commercial space and the people displaced by the storm are trying to buy houses."
One of the biggest business stories in Mississippi is the loss of $500,000 a day in tax revenue from the state's casino industry. Not to mention the thousands of jobs that depend on the gambling industry to pay their bills.
"That industry alone on the coast is 14,000 jobs," says Scott Waller, business editor for The Clarion Ledger in Jackson. "Without the hurricane a 13th casino (The Hard Rock) would have been opened today. The industry if for all effect and purposes shut down."
State officials wonder just how debilitating Katrina will be to the long-term viability and presence of the casino business in Mississippi.
"Now that the oft-mentioned doomsday scenario of a direct hit taking down the Coast casino and tourism industry is reality, state officials are unsure what happens next, and exactly how hard the state economy and the state budget will be hammered," write Geoff Pender and Tom Wilemon for the Sun Herald in Biloxi. "State leaders wonder whether the industry will rebuild or pull stakes."
In Alabama, Birmingham News reporter Russell Hubbard explores the attraction of mobile homes as officials look to house thousands of refugees for months on end. Shares of some manufacturers in this sector rose as much as 20 percent.
"Manufactured housing makers can produce hundreds of single-wide units a week for use as emergency dwellings," Hubbard writes. "It's a fast, no-frills option that gets people indoors quickly and is increasingly preferred by federal planners, who bought thousands of them last year after Hurricanes Charley and Ivan hit the Southeast."
Waller says the walls in his newsroom between sections came down following the hurricane. Various desks have worked together to report on issues such as insurance claims, gas shortages, utility issues, banking industries, water supplies and generators.
"From a business perspective, this is something that is going to last for a long time to come," Waller says.
Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism
