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Continued from previous page
Margaret Popper,
WG'89: Balance
is key
Of all the tough things journalists
write about—war, quantum physics,
opera, space travel—corporate
America is one of the trickiest to
negotiate.
It's sadly true that some reporters
struggle to learn the difference
between a cash flow statement and a
balance sheet. But even the best-trained
business writers have an
extremely difficult job. The reason?
No matter how much a journalist
knows, there is always someone out
there to criticize.
Business coverage is dissected by
an army of highly trained, razor-sharp
businesspeople and the public relations
execs who labor for them.
Margaret Popper is up against
them every day. "Against them," that
is, because the relationship between
journalists and business is inherently
adversarial. News is about the fringes
of behavior. "Dog bites man" is rarely
a story. "Man bites dog" is Page 1.
Popper works for Bloomberg
News, the New York-based brainchild
of billionaire businessman-turned
NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It's
a company whose information is on
the need-to-know list of all major
news organizations that cover business,
not to mention any company
that wants to control its own image
or understand its competitors.
Popper writes about Morgan Stanley
and Bear Sterns & Co., as well as
general "enterprise" about Wall Street.
"Enterprise," in journalistic lingo,
means pretty much anything other
than breaking news. The reporters
who do it are the ones who actually
have time to contemplate a story
before slapping it into print or on air.
Take, for example, one of Popper's
stories from last fall. The headline
read: "Ameritrade's low-cost online
trades help beat Schwab." The story
went on to detail how Ameritrade,
with a staff one-tenth the size of
Schwab's, managed to grow its operating
profit margin to 52 percent, four
times that of Schwab.
Those were the facts, but not ones
Schwab execs were thrilled to see in
print. Popper, who earned an undergraduate
degree in English from Yale
and worked in investment banking
before attending Wharton, says she
tries to manage such dicey source
relationships by making sure her stories
are balanced. She talks to a firm's
friends as well as its enemies.
"The fact that I have an MBA
helps. The fact that it's from Wharton
helps tremendously. It says 'You have
to take me seriously. I know what
you're about,'" Popper says.
Dr. Roy Peter Clark, vice president
of the Poynter Institute for journalists,
says alums like Popper are on the
leading edge of journalism's journey
from trade to profession. "There has
been a sort of an evolving sense in the
last 20 or 30 years that the most
important news is increasingly complex,"
Clark says. "While it is not
impossible for the good generalist to
tackle these stories, we've seen lots of
examples where reporters with specialized
knowledge and specialized
training have been able to report stories
in powerful and revealing ways."
Dr. Clark went on to say that if a
journalist is good, one sign of their
power and knowledge is that they will
be both feared and respected.
Popper, Vise and Daniszewski all
dance a delicate dance with the people
they write about. (Uygur, as a talk
show host paid to stir opinions, simply
bubbles when people say they
hate him.) The other three Wharton
grads, however, work hard to balance
the good will of their sources with the
sometimes negative news that must
be reported.
"It's difficult. You fight it every
day," Popper says.
Vise waxes a bit philosophically
about the matter. "A newspaper, at
best, catches history on the run," he
says. "All the stories, words, images,
it's amazing what happens every single
day. If aliens came from Mars,
landed on Earth and picked up The
Washington Post or The New York
Times, they would not get an accurate
picture of society. But they would get
the extremes of behavior, both good
and bad."
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