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
Whether in San Francisco or San Juan, business reporters seem to find many of their sources and stories in the same places -- through documents and footwork.
Newspaper editors in Puerto Rico and Guam say their reporting process is no different from their counterparts in the mainland U.S. They regularly read a company's government filings and tap tools like LexisNexis and Bloomberg. And they rely on strong source-building skills to go deeper into company coverage.
"We work with our sources to take advantage of opportunities for exclusive stories," says Ken Oliver-Méndez, deputy business editor at El Nuevo Día in Puerto Rico. "Our reporters also regularly attend professional events that are held in the industries that they cover."
He says his desk's subscription to Bloomberg helps crack open news about local public companies. But otherwise, he and Rindraty Celes Limtiaco, executive editor at Pacific Daily News in Guam, say documents about public companies are readily available at government agencies and newspaper archives.
"The Internet is fairly critical in regard to this," Limtiaco, a Reynolds Center at API board member, said in a recent Q&A with BusinessJournalism.org.
Both editors say their focus remains on the average reader, even in the most complex business stories -- a business journalism tenet across the United States, from community newspapers to The Wall Street Journal.
"We also make an extra effort to include the average consumer's angle or consumer-oriented content as a staple of our coverage," Oliver-Méndez says.
He says that can be difficult in the face of PR pressure, again a common problem for business reporters miles away from the islands. His solution will sound familiar to many a business editor who offers briefs or columns with PR-friendly company tidbits in their sections.
"It is just a matter of being firm in maintaining our journalistic agenda," Oliver-Méndez says. "We also have created an outlet for "PR"-type items and stories in our weekday and weekend products, in order to placate the PR side to some degree."
One unique challenge for these editors, however, is constantly covering companies geared more toward a different ethnic group. Whether based in Asia or Guam, companies that more heavily embrace Asian culture can require an extra eye, Limtiaco says.
"We have to be sensitive to that, understand it and know how to work with that," she says.
Beyond that difference, however, even the islands' biggest sectors and stories of the year so far match up with the mainland.
Guam business reporters, for instance, found themselves writing about jobs and real estate prices, while Puerto Rican business writers covered the lack of gas from a trucker strike and accounting scandals at local mortgage firms.
Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism
