Attacks Spark Creation of a New Business Beat
One of the hottest business beats on Wall Street has little to do with covering stocks and bonds and everything to do with chronicling a new beginning.
As a result of the deadly Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, Dow Jones Newswires and the Wall Street Journal have shifted a significant number of reporters to monitor the event’s effect on Wall Street through articles about real estate, infrastructure and technology.
Dow Jones Newswires broke precedent Sept. 19 by publishing its first free, weekly e-mail newsletter featuring stories about the financial district’s rebirth, rebuilding and future.
“It’s a public service through the end of the year,” said Richard J. Levine, vice president and managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires, a service with 900 editorial contributors in 90 cities worldwide.
“We publish about half a dozen newsletters, but we’ve never put one together this quickly,” Levine said, adding that the newsletter will continue to be published weekly.
Other newsletters at the Web site are dedicated to narrower subjects, such as “High Yield Weekly,” whose mainly corporate clients pay from $1,000 to $5,000 a year for subscriptions. But covering the lasting effects of the trade center attack and the deaths of about 6,300 people there required its own place, Levine said.
The newsletter is striped with a banner that reads, “Rebuilding Wall Street; The Restoration of America’s Financial Marketplace.” Among the articles posted this week in the second newsletter was one report on the drop in business for small food vendors and another on the dip in home sales.
The Journal, which is part of the Dow Jones Co., has a logo accompanying each article that depicts briefcase-carrying men and women stepping forward to greet a new day above the words “Rebuilding Wall Street.”
“This is our core readership, and it’s our job to tell them how things have been affected and what’s happened as Wall Street tries to return to business as usual,” said Larry Ingrassia, editor of the Journal’s “Money & Investing” section.
“I thought [the graphic] was a way to visually convey people getting back to work, the business of trading and making the markets work the way they should and have. It shows people with a purpose, and I think there’s tremendous determination on Wall Street not to be defeated,” Ingrassia said.
