Navigating Business Journalism with Financial News Editor Victoria Cavaliere
Bloomberg Editor and NYU Journalism Professor Victoria Cavaliere shares how she succeeds in the fast-paced world of Business Journalism.
“I tell my students to just voraciously read the news like you’re going into news meetings every day. You need to know exactly what’s going on, and that even means the incremental aspect of whatever stories or beats you’re really interested in.”
This is some of the advice you can hear from Victoria Cavaliere while she is teaching at the NYU Business and Economic Graduate Program.
The landscape of Business Journalism can be very overwhelming with the face-paced nature of churning out stories, as well as constantly analyzing economic trends. Current Bloomberg News Editor, Cavaliere specializes in business and financial reporting. I was able to have a phone call with Cavaliere to understand how her journalism interests led her to find financial reporting, as well as to get a general sense of how to navigate and succeed in financial journalism.
I saw that you have a BA in English and History from UT Austin, and a MA in international journalism. Did the interest in writing and journalism come before your interest in specifically writing about business?
It did. I really started out focusing on doing more international news for news reporting in Africa and taking it from that angle. I kind of accidentally fell into business journalism a few years into my career, but I wish I would have approached even the first part of my career with that lens because I think it’s really a huge disservice to try to go into any situation and not understand who the power brokers are, where the money is coming from, what the challenges are financially for people and on the reverse of that,what assets does the place have, A place like Venezuela, for example, with terrible inflation and a really beleaguered economy but yet so rich in resources and oil, I think understanding that from the business lens means you can understand it on every level, including the day to day of what people go through to just get some groceries there, for example.
Economics reporting sometimes gets criticized for being an onlooker’s perspective. How does being on the ground factor in here? For you, how did reporting first hand in South Africa/South America shift your perspective.
You can’t possibly know or understand a place on anything more than a surface level unless you actually go and spend some time and learn about the culture, you’ll learn food, language, people, and the systems. You’ll know the big and small industries;how the government works; who are the power players; We kind of lean towards sort of thinking we can do everything online or through a series of phone calls, but you know, it’s old fashioned shoe leather reporting, where you go and get stories just by talking to everybody you possibly can. There’s no replacing that.
You started as a correspondent for Reuters. How was the transition to an editor for CNN?
Working for wire service Reuters, it’s the biggest news agency in the world, and it’s incredibly high standards of editing and news judgment. Being a correspondent also means you have to be a strong writer, but you do actually have to do a lot of editing and working with copy from stringers. It’s the best preparation to go anywhere else, because of how fast paced and exacting it is, and how many eyeballs are on your work. So I just took that with me when I went to CNN and started primarily editing there. Typically editing comes with its own set of challenges and learning curve, and you have to really ramp up to it. But I think having worked out at a wire service helped.
Tell me about those challenges. How’s the editing in business reporting different from, say, Vogue?
People that can work in breaking news, whether it’s business or politics or general news, you have to have a certain metabolism. You have to be able to just really concentrate under pressure and not get terribly flustered. Sometimes you really don’t know until you start working in that kind of world whether you can do it or not. For business news, the good thing is we have numbers and those are easy to fact check. You don’t want to infer something or make leaps and assumptions, so that’s where being a good editor comes in.
That must be tough when a lot of the industry is based on predictions. How do you balance that?
Any news story, there should be the contrarian argument. Not every single person at the beginning of last year predicted a recession. There were a lot of people that were in the soft landing camp for the US economy. You always want to be fair and balanced as much as you can in every story. As the reporter or the editor you’re not in it to trust these voices. If there’s a question that can’t be answered for the reader, address it by saying that it’s not immediately known. That just adds an extra layer of transparency in your reporting and writing. But you try to just give your readers, the best experts with the best information that you have in that exact moment, and then that could look totally different a week later.
Talk us through how you prioritize stories for the Bloomberg Weekly News entries.
The challenge with the Bloomberg newsletter is that it really needs to sum up so much of what happened in the week and also give play to some stories that maybe didn’t get as many eyeballs as they should. Try to kind of make it not seem so disparate. When I’m really proud of it [the newsletter], it’s because it flows from one world issue into another if you will. We do tend to keep it more focused on North America and the US since that’s primarily where our readers are. The idea is to end usually on something more featuring or lighter, to sort of say, Okay, here’s all the stuff that’s happened this week. And by the way, here’s a recipe for sangria.
