SABEW26

Becky Yerak has been covering corporate bankruptcies for nearly a decade at The Wall Street Journal from Wilmington, Del., where she has a front-row seat to the maneuvers companies make as they stave off creditors in their fight for survival. Becky will provide a bankruptcy primer that demystifies corporate restructuring and explains how to deliver stories that go beyond court proceedings and legal filings. Rachel Jaffe Mauceri, an attorney at Robinson & Cole LLP, will join Becky to help elucidate the topic.

No matter your beat, digging into nonprofits, charities and corporations can yield great accountability stories. We’ll show you where to look and what records and data are available, including how to spot red flags in tax documents.

This panel is in partnership with Investigative Reporters & Editors.

From ChatGPT to TikTok to SpaceX: Several of today’s most influential companies are privately held which challenges journalists accustomed to the plentiful information available on public companies. Journalists who have developed sources, scoured documents and found other ways to uncover closely guarded details share their best tips for covering private companies, whether big or small. 

Audiences are changing fast and with it, the way they consume journalism. Attention spans are shorter, platforms are more fragmented and many readers are finding business news through social feeds, podcasts, video clips and newsletters before they ever click on a story. 

For journalists, that raises a pressing question: How do you tell rigorous, nuanced business stories beyond the traditional written word? This session will feature reporters who are successfully using social media, audio, video and other formats to reach new audiences. They’ll share the creative risks they’ve taken, what’s worked (and what hasn’t) and how experimenting with new storytelling tools has changed the way they approach their reporting.