Getting Your Market’s Economic Scoop in Tough Times

Date: Friday, March 27
Time: 1:00 p.m. Eastern time
Duration: 60 minutes

Webinar Overview

Business-to-business editors generally are skilled at covering day-to-day happenings in their industries. But their reporting often falls short when exploring the effects of an economic downturn and the measures that business undertake to deal with the resulting squeeze on their balance sheets. In this webinar, panelists Roy Harris, senior editor, CFO, and Steve Ross, editor, Broadband Properties, will examine how editors can cover the current economy in their publications. Attendees will learn what questions to ask of sources, how to analyze their markets, and what tools editors can use to find additional information.

What You’ll Learn…

  • What questions to ask sources who work in the markets you cover.
  • Which tools, third-parties and online resources to consult when pursuing your story.
  • How an understanding of key accounting ratios, among other considerations, will help you to judge whether a company can survive bankruptcy.
  • How to analyze and interpret the answers you get about the companies and industries you’re researching.
  • What actions companies might take because of the contracting economy or their own deteriorating financial situation.
  • What your readers most want to know and how to convey your findings for maximum impact.

Webinar Details

Where: Your computer. You will need a dial-in number, URL and access codes to participate.

How to register: To reserve your place, you must complete two steps:

  1. submit payment; and
  2. visit the web page where you will actually register.

Payment (credit card or check payable to ASBPE) should be submitted to the contact listed on this form (72K Word doc). Upon receipt of payment, you will receive an e-mail with the online registration link. A second e-mail will follow identifying the dial-in number, URL and access codes needed to join the webinar.

Charge: This Webinar is $10.00 for all ASBPE members and $35.00 for non-members.

About the Panelists

Roy J. Harris Jr., a senior editor for The Economist Group’s CFO magazine, has been a journalist for some of the nation’s most respected news publications for four decades. From 1971 to 1994 he served as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, including six years as deputy chief of its fourteen-member Los Angeles bureau. During his 12 years in Boston with CFO, he served from 2006 to 2007 as national president of the American Society of Business Publication Editors. He also serves as vice president of the ASBPE Foundation. But he has retained his passion for the newspaper business, regularly contributing articles on the Pulitzer Prizes to the web site of the St. Petersburg, Florida-based Poynter Institute. He has also taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Emerson College. He is additionally the author of Pulitzer’s Gold, the first book to trace the ninety-year history of the coveted Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

Steve Ross has combined a career in teaching, writing, consulting, and technology. He now edits a trade/professional magazine (Broadband Properties) and teaches business writing at the Harvard Extension. From 1985 until mid-2004, Ross taught full-time at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where he was an associate professor of professional practice, teaching new media, national, and computer-assisted reporting. Since 1994, Ross has been conducting the nation’s largest surveys of journalists’ use of online services including (but not limited to) the World Wide Web. Among his 19 books are works on business, the environment and planning, multimedia, finance, statistics, product safety, and toxic substances. He is now under contract with The McGraw-Hill Companies to produce textbooks for analytic journalism and new media.

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