Pulitzer winner Brody Mullins, NPR’s Rafael Nam and Olivia Evans of the Louisville Courier-Journal offered expert insights on telling compelling business stories that resonate with all audiences.
Program Date: Sept. 18, 2025
Covering local business involves more than just the financial bottom line. Increasingly, politics, environmental impact and public engagement are among a broad range of factors journalist must consider when analyzing the business community’s role in civic life.
During the National Press Foundation Local Business Journalism Fellowship, journalists Brody Mullins (Wall Street Journal), Rafael Nam (NPR) and Olivia Evans (Louisville Courier Journal), a program fellow as well as a 2024 NPF Widening the Pipeline fellow, shared reporting strategies. One common theme: Look where others aren’t, especially if that means focusing on the people behind the stories.
Here are three tips to remember when covering business:
Many Business Stories Start with Policy
Mullins, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter, said his expertise was honed as a young reporter covering committees and subcommittees in his hometown of Washington, DC. It was fascinating work, “because it’s where business policies really made, where lobbyists are fighting it out, where there’s a lot of campaign donations and there’s very few people covering committees. I mean, everyone focuses on presidential tweets and votes on the House and Senate floor, but in committees and subcommittees on Capitol Hill, there are really great industry fights that no one’s paying attention to. So I sort of made my mark covering business and regulatory issues at the committee level and then got noticed by the Wall Street Journal.”
Mullins wrote scores of groundbreaking stories for the Wall Street Journal that prompted new laws and regulations for powerful government officials, lobbyists, and Wall Street traders. His book “The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government” came out this year.
When a Story Seems Huge, Think Local
Nam a senior business editor at NPR, imparted a lesson from earlier in his career as a Reuters correspondent in Asia: Don’t cover global markets without remembering the impact of people right in front of you.
He recalled a breaking news event when India ceased producing high-denomination currency because it was being used in money laundering.
“I remember leaving my home and heading to work thinking about all the ways we were going to cover the story. And I remember seeing all these people lined up by the ATM machines. … It just kind of really struck me that even though we were all trying to digest the implications of this as a Reuters chief correspondent, kind of thinking about how is this going to impact markets … when as a human, they reacted by going to the bank trying to withdraw as much money as they can because they weren’t sure what this is,” Nam said. “They were just scared for their money. And it just kind of really drilled in to me how you can talk about data all you want, but it always has an impact on somebody and on businesses.”
Now that he’s at NPR, Nam says a major goal is finding ways to communicate finance and business stories without confusing jargon.
“We try to capture that and explain broad economic concepts in ways that make sense,” he said. “It’s been months now that we’ve been covering tariffs. And one of the things that we always do when we set up that to cover is how it impacts people, how it impacts especially small businesses – because we do think that small businesses are the backbone of the economy.”
Invest in Building Relationships
Evans, an award-winning reporter who covers Kentucky business and industry trends, says one of her favorite responsibilities is truly embedding with sources in her hometown of Louisville.
The United Parcel Service Worldport is located there, and it’s the largest UPS facility in the world. So when the Teamsters Union and UPS started their contract negotiations in 2023, Evans knew it would have a big impact on not just the city but the global economy if all that shipping just stopped.
“I spent time with the teamsters, I went inside the facility, I saw the work they’re doing, I learned what their concerns are,” Evans said. When the tense negotiations shifted stages, that networking yielded big dividends. “I’ve still got sources who, from Louisville, came up to D.C. for the negotiations and they were able to give me text-by-text live updates on what’s going on. And then ultimately the Courier Journal is able to break the international news that they had indeed reached a contract before either side put out a press release about it. I couldn’t have done that work without those sources having let me into their space and given me the trust and the time to spend with them well before the contract came up.”
Access the full transcript.
This fellowship is sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as part of a journalism training and award program. NPF is solely responsible for its content.