Meet the National Press

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Following the introduction of the 2009 Dodge Ram pickup truck at Detroit’s North American International Auto Show in January, Chrysler Chairman Bob Nardelli was the center of national attention.

Photo by Jim Bourg

DETROIT - It was April 5, 2007, the week before Easter, and John Stoll, Detroit Bureau Chief for Dow Jones Newswires, was in New York to meet with his editors and other bosses. While he was in town, Stoll hoped to catch up with some of his Wall Street sources and hopefully go away with some useful news tips on the automotive industry. He had also scored a couple of seats to watch the Yankees play the Tampa Bay Devil Rays — again, with a source. Of course, the news didn’t stop while Stoll was out of town (Ford Motor Co. announced in its proxy statement that day that new CEO Alan Mulally had been paid $28 million after four months on the job), but he was confident his office back in Detroit had that situation well in hand. He was looking forward to a productive, relatively uneventful week in the Big Apple. Little did he know how productive — or how eventful — it would turn out to be.

Around midday, Stoll left the Dow Jones Newswires headquarters in the Harborside Financial Center in Jersey City and walked three blocks to the Flamingo diner for a quick lunch with a colleague. He had just ordered soup and salad when his BlackBerry buzzed. Stoll ignored it at first, hoping to steal a break from the pressure of his job and enjoy some time with his friend. But the BlackBerry persisted, erupting with calls and e-mails. Stoll relented and answered his phone. It was one of his most trusted sources from the financial world.

“They told me that Kirk Kerkorian was going to make a $4.5-billion cash offer for Chrysler,” he recalls. “They had copies of documents that Kerkorian was going to file with the SEC and a copy of a letter from [Kerkorian aide] Jerry York to Dieter [Zetsche, DaimlerChrysler chairman] saying the offer was contingent upon Chrysler signing a favorable labor contract with the UAW.” Flush with adrenaline, Stoll excused himself just as his soup arrived. “Like a surgeon being called to deliver a baby, you have to drop everything,” he says. Stoll immediately called his editor in Chicago to tell him about the tip. After agreeing that the source’s reliability and the authenticity of the leaked documents were sufficient to confirm the story, a headline moved on the Dow Jones newswire at 12:43 p.m., before Stoll even got back to his Harborside office. Within moments, a frenzy of trading erupted in the markets across the Hudson River from where Stoll had answered his BlackBerry.

“We beat our competitors by at least 10 minutes,” Stoll says, “and in the amount of time we had that story and our competitors didn’t, more than $3 billion in market capitalization was added to the value of DaimlerChrysler. Meaning that our readers at the Dow Jones Newswires, The Wall Street Journal, and CNBC (with whom Dow Jones has a content-sharing agreement) were able to enjoy a $3 billion market that every other reader of every other publication was locked out of for that 10 minutes.”
Stoll says the last thing on his mind that day was how the market was going to react. Indeed, another bit of breaking news could’ve easily sent the market reeling in the opposite direction. The important thing to him was to have been able to get the news out first, fast and accurately — simply, to achieve his journalistic raison d’être. “Scoops are the lifeline of a reporter,” he says. “It’s what you live for.” And a scoop in the world of wire services is even sweeter, considering the ferocity of the competition.

“I’ve played plenty of sports in my life,” Stoll says, “[but] I’ve never had anything come close to matching the competitive nature of working for a wire. Wire services live and die by their ability to update stories with pertinent information. My job is to make sure my readers are armed and equipped with the information they need, when they need it. … Even though Kirk Kerkorian didn’t end up buying Chrysler, his interest legitimized the deal and added value.”

Seizing on the significance of Stoll’s story, the Dow Jones promotions machine went into high gear, running a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal the following week with the headline “Dow Jones — Privileged Information Can Be Turned Into a Profit.” In the financial news business, a 10-minute edge clearly qualifies you for bragging rights.

As dramatic as it was, John Stoll’s scoop was not an isolated incident. Stories regularly come out of Detroit whose impact is felt around the country, and around the word. And it’s for this reason so many national news organizations have bureaus in town. With the Detroit Three automakers and other major corporations, major sports teams and sporting events, a diverse population, and an impressive pop-culture heritage, Detroit has, for decades, been a magnet for big-name media organizations that explain and expose the city to national — and often global — audiences. Today, Detroit is home to bureaus and correspondents for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, Time, and Newsweek, as well as the Associated Press, Bloomberg News, Dow Jones, and Reuters wire services.
This relatively vibrant news environment is rather at odds with national trends that show news budgets, staffs, and bureaus shrinking. At the end of 2006, there were 1,437 daily newspapers in the United States with a combined circulation of 52.3 million, down from 1,688 papers with a circulation of 63.3 million in 1984, according to the Newspaper Association of America. In 2007, Time Inc., announced that it was cutting 289 people, closing Time magazine bureaus in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta, and even cutting seven jobs in Time’s Washington, D.C. bureau. BusinessWeek in past years has shuttered its bureaus in Dallas and Pittsburgh. Newspapers are feeling the pinch from San Jose to Florida to Michigan, where dozens of Detroit Free Press and Detroit News editorial employees accepted voluntary buyouts in the last three years, according to Local 34022, the Newspaper Guild of Detroit.
 

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