NY

Betsy McKay informed in the last week of April that I had selected to attend Dow Jones News Fund’s one week training workshop on the business reporting in New York. It was surprising for me as I was never interested in covering business or finance and she knew it. I was pretty much sure that no training could develop my interest in business reporting but at the same time I did not want to waste opportunity to visit New York.

So, on May 23 I reached New York to attend the one week long workshop. I was, in fact, terrified of the idea of ‘wasting’ one whole week on the issues like earnings, layoffs, mergers and bankruptcies. I had never done a business story in my professional life. The first two/three hours of first day of training were terrible for me. Reading the financial statements of the companies and the press releases on their earnings were pain… Then there was a mock press conference by CEO of one big company which had lost some cents on a share during the last quarter of 2009. I did not ask a single question.

We were supposed to write a story on the basis of the original press release of the company and the mock press conference. We were given 40 minutes for the exercise.

After playing with the papers and pen for 10 minutes, I went to Michelle LaRoche, program director and training editor at Dow Jones Newswires and told her that I couldn’t do it and wanted to leave the training workshop. She convinced me to give a try to write the news story and to spend one more day before making a decision. Her friendly behavior helped releasing the pressure on me to some extent and I wrote the story.

After the lunch Chaz Repak, the principal instructor made the critique on the exercise and surprisingly he liked my attempt. It gave me confidence and I started showing interest in the afternoon session.

The next day, Dick Levine, DJNF president visited us and shared the philosophy of the fund and his experiences. He was attached with the fund more than 25 years. His disclosure of being a war reporter who covered the Vietnam before becoming a business reporter was shock for me. “How could a war reporter become a business reporter” I couldn’t stop myself to ask the question. “Only training and reading can help” he replied. He also helped me a lot to come out of my shell of anti-business reporter.

The next few days we constantly worked on writing leads and nutgraphs for range of business stories. The main focus of the training was writing shorter and faster like the wire service reporters. We also discussed range of story ideas and made plan how to do it.

At the end of the day, I realized that workshop gave me a lot of confidence as a reporter helped me a lot to become a diversified reporter and in writing shorter. Later, during my trip I visited Bloomberg head office in New York and found that I was asking some typical ‘business reporter’ questions to Peter Young who gave us a guided tour of the office. The two hour tour helped us a lot to understand the working of Bloomberg and its business model.

During my stay at New York, I also visited head offices of the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Propublica. I attended the meetings of both foreign desks and executive editors at WSJ and NYT. It was a great opportunity for me to understand what made a story to become a WSJ or NYT story.

It was great honour for me to sit among the editors of WSJ and NYT and it was mainly because of AFPF and Daniel Pearl Fellowship. Thanks a lot for providing me such a gigantic opportunity. I am pretty much sure that together we can bring the change. You have done your part, now its my turn to deliver. I promise you guys that i will try my level best to share this experience and exposure with my colleagues back home.