By MOLLY SINCLAIR McCARTNEY
Special to Poynter.org
Paul Solman, the premier economics reporter of public television, takes great pride in what he considers the secret of his art.
It is this: Ask the stupid question.
In the arcane world of economics, where jargon reigns supreme, Solman likes to ask the so-called experts questions like these:
- What is a stock?
- How does the stock market affect the economy?
- Did the crash of 1929 cause the Depression?
And what he has learned as a television reporter, he said in a recent interview with Poynter.org, is that these are exactly the kinds of questions that can help the public understand the world of economics a little better.
For Paul Solman does not think of himself as a reporter. He thinks of himself as a teacher. Or as he puts it: a “video teacher of economics in the guise of a journalist.” And by any measure you wish to adopt, Solman has become one of the best teachers in the business.
He began his career in journalism with Boston’s alternative press and served as founding editor of the well known weekly, The Real Paper. He began his career in business journalism with a Nieman Fellowship (1976-1977) that enabled him to attend Harvard Business School as a first-year MBA student.
After his Nieman year at Harvard, Solman moved into business reporting for the local news on public television in Boston at WGBH.
Since 1985, he has been the business and economics correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Solman covers art and sports for the program as well.
For his work he has been gained widespread recognition and a number of awards, including Emmys in the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s as well as a Peabody. He has been a consultant for Mother Jones Magazine and served on the Harvard Business School faculty.
Here is what he had to say in a recent interview with Poynter.org:
You have said many times that a reporter trying to cover economics needs to have the nerve to ask the Stupid question. Can you give an example of two or three stupid questions that reporters might ask in trying to cover today’s economic stories?
I continue to think this is the key to my own career, since I never took an economic course in college or graduate school. I came to the subject knowing literally nothing. As a result, I didn’t know what a stupid question was.
And because there was a world I didn’t know anything about and because it struck me as embarrassing, especially since I had attitudes toward business and the economy, I applied for a Nieman Fellowship in 1976 in order to go to Harvard Business School.
The important thing for me has been to preserve a naiveté, a sense of wonder. And that means resisting the temptation to try to show my interview subjects that I know a lot of stuff.
Examples of stupid questions: What is a stock worth? What determines a stock’s value? How does the stock market affect the economy? And why would it affect the economy, if it does? Did the crash of 1929 actually cause the Depression?
What is a stock? What is the NASDAQ? What is a bond? What is the bond market?
How do you define your objective in covering an economic story today?
I think of myself as a kind of video teacher. My attitude is that there are lots of people out there showing what is going on minute to minute so I am going to try to help you (the viewer) make sense of it. I am not going to tell you what to think, but I am going to be like a video teacher of economics in the guise of a journalist.
What I try to figure out is what I can teach people that may be useful to them in understanding the material world and thus feel more like citizens who can make educated economic decisions, as we’re all supposed to be able to in a democracy. I use interesting stories as my pretext to try to teach people how the material world works. And since there are innumerable facets to that world, there’s no end of stories to do.
When I do my storytelling, I think of myself as demystifying economics. When people tell me I’ve made things so simple that even THEY can understand it, that’s when I feel I’ve succeeded.
Explain how you go about doing your job these days, given what is going on with the Bush tax proposal, the stock market, and the economic slowdown.
I am reading all the time — the Wall Street Journal, The Economist — listening to National Public Radio. And right now tuning into the stock market because that is a big story. When I have time, I try to read economic history and economic classics, because I am always trying to understand the basics which give me a context for what is going on.
Is there a good basic text for someone covering economics?
There are a number of books. Basic economics textbooks, for instance or histories of economic thought like Robert Heilbroner’s “The Worldly Philosophers” and Todd Buchholz’s “New Ideas from Dead Economists.” Once you start reading books like these, you will find that economics is a really a point of view. It is a perspective for looking at the world. And while people within the discipline disagree on policy prescriptions, few economists would disagree on the basics.
Paul Solman
Economics (and occasionally Arts) Correspondent
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer
WGBH
After years in Boston’s alternative press (he was founding editor of the fabled weekly, The Real Paper), PAUL SOLMAN began his career in business journalism on a Nieman Fellowship (1976-77), which he spent as a first-year MBA student at the Harvard Business School. He then became a business reporter for the local news on public television in Boston (WGBH). After spending a few years (’79-’81) as co-originator and executive editor of public broadcasting’s business documentary series, Enterprise, he returned to producing and hosting local news and national documentaries. In 1985, Solman became business and economics correspondent for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer (formerly, The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour). A decade later, he began covering art (and sports) for the program as well.
Along the way, Solman has won Emmys (in the ’70s, ‘80s and ‘90s) and a Peabody, among other awards, has consulted to Mother Jones Magazine, and served on the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media and finance at the school’s Advanced Management Program, where he also developed an interactive all-day simulation of a hostile takeover (“the M&A Game”) that he teaches throughout the world. With writer and public television executive Thomas Friedman, he co-authored a much-better-than-average-seller about the myths of American business, Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield (Simon and Schuster, 1983), which also appeared in Japanese, German and a pirated Taiwanese edition. He also helped create, and wrote the introduction to, “Morrie in His Own Words,” a book of interviews with his late Brandeis sociology professor, Morrie Schwartz (of “Tuesdays with Morrie” fame).
Solman has been a taxi driver, consultant, kindergarten teacher and graduate student. He writes infrequently, lectures occasionally, and has been working to help journalists and television producers in other countries (to date, Russia and Poland) explain economics using video. He is also developing a new electronic curriculum for business and economics entitled “Economics Made Memorable with Paul Solman.”
His wife, Jan Freeman, is an editor at The Boston Globe, where she also writes a column on language (“The Word”); his two daughters are Joanna, still in school and Rachel, who works in video, new media and consulting.
What would you do if you were reporting for print rather than video?
The difference in doing video and print is that you have to have stuff for people to see when you do video. And it is more important in video to have compelling characters – people who can talk.
If you have a stutterer, it is a problem for video. It is not a problem for print.
With video, you have to think about whether the person can speak in an interesting way; whether the person has an accent that would make it hard for listeners to understand.
You also want to be in physically interesting environments with video because you need something interesting for people to see. It is a curious requisite for doing an interesting story. Whereas in print you can find out what’s interesting about a person and make them sound interesting. And if you are a good enough writer, you can create the scene that the camera couldn’t pick up because of lighting and so forth.
Radio is much easier in terms of the logistical demands. With TV, you have to lug equipment. Even in this day and age of smaller cameras, you are still in a situation where logistics are a large part of the enterprise.
I used to say that in print you spent about 85 percent of your time researching the story and maybe 15 percent producing (writing). In TV, it’s the reverse, or maybe 30-70. Because in TV, you spend most of your time talking to people to set up the shoot, getting the camera crew, getting people to the right place, getting clearance, and setting the scene. It is tremendously more time-consuming than writing the story. (Unless you’ve got writer’s block, of course.)
How has technology changed the way that you do your job, compared to when you started back in the 1970s?
The one big change is you can get information over the Internet. You can go on the Internet and check any stock, find all kinds of statistical information. Before you had to have all the right books and you had to have them updated.
The ability to quickly get material in context is there today. That is the big difference. And it is definitely an advantage.
But the main technology I use is the telephone. When I am confused about things or need some point of view, I call up a professor I have befriended or have lunch with him or her. That gives me more ideas than I could ever use.
But you operate in a rather rare and privileged environment. You are based in Boston, with Harvard University and all its resources available to you. And you have national television exposure. What if you were working for a small or medium sized news organization somewhere else in the country? Then how would you about trying to cover today’s economic story in a meaningful way for your market?
I started out working for Boston After Dark and The Real Paper, weekly alternative newspapers that few in the business world had heard of, and even fewer took seriously. But I found then and I have found ever since that professionals of any sort are eager to help you understand their world and how it works if you are eager to learn and willing to ask the stupid question.
I think reporters have a moral claim on the rest of the world with respect to this aspect of the job. Which is that we are the media, for better and for worse. We are the intermediaries. We are the go betweens. So you Mr. Economics Professor, or Ms. Lawyer, you can’t complain that coverage is stupid if you aren’t going to explain to me — the intermediary – how it works.
Now if you (the reporter) call and ask if the stock market is going down in the next 10 minutes, then the person you are calling may not bother with you. But if I call a professor like Tom McCraw (a legendary figure at the Harvard Business School), and ask about the Microsoft case and context, I believe he has an obligation to provide that context. But I almost never have to make that argument. Professors love to teach — even (and sometimes especially) to teach journalists.
If you are starting out as a reporter – and I don’t care how obscure the place you are working – call the local college faculty, befriend them, take them to lunch and say, “Teach me.”
Start by asking those stupid questions – what is the stock market, and so forth. And in general you will get an informative response. When you say ‘please teach me,’ I’ve found that you pretty much get a receptive audience anywhere you go.
