Dan Reed joined USA TODAY's MONEY staff in July 2002, as the fourth and newest member of the paper's business travel/ airlines reporting team. Prior to joining USA TODAY, he worked at the Fort Worth Star- Telegram for 21 years. For the last 18 of those years he covered the airline industry. In that time he earned a reputation as one of the top airline beat reporters in the nation, and a number of national, state and local reporting awards. With nearly 20 years of covering airlines, Reed is the dean of airline beat reporters at the nations' major dailies. He also is the author of the award winning "The American Eagle: The Ascent of Bob Crandall and American Airlines (St. Martin's Press, 1993), and is currently working on a second book about the airline industry. Early in his career Reed was a sports writer for the Arkansas Democrat in Little Rock, wrote The Sentinel Record in his hometown of Hot Springs, Arkansas, and served in a variety of positions including entertainment and sports editor and senior editorial writer for his college newspaper at the University of Arkansas. Reed earned a Master's of Divinity degree in theology and ethics from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. He is married, the father of three teenage sons and is active in church and youth sports work in Fort Worth.
Behind the Story: A Reporter's Notebook
Below are notes Dan provided us as background information on several articles he has written recently about the airline industry and their financial challenges which were compiled for a case study on "Finding Flight: The Airline Industry."
Both of these stories originally were conceived as part of a package of stories that would accompany a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing by United Airlines, or that would run just slightly ahead of such a filing if a news even warranted it. Our business travel team met on this several times via conference call (we're in DC, Miami, LA, and Fort Worth - I'm in Fort Worth) in late October and early November with Judi Austin (our auto team editor who was temporarily handling us too while our editor was on special assignment leading the corporate accounting scandals coverage team). In those meetings we hashed out both United's specific problems and the broader issues facing the entire airline industry. From that we each proposed stories we thought would best answer questions we believed our readers would be asking around the time of a United bankruptcy filing. The stories of mine were part of that package. The writing of both was completed the day after Thanksgiving (actually the Q&A was done a week before that but was way too long, so I chopped it down on the slow day after Thanksgiving). Editing and rewrite followed on the next Monday. The stories ran on Friday Dec. 6, with almost no changes required as a result of breaking news.
The first of the two, "Why Airlines have trouble turning a profit" is a simple Q&A, not tied to any specific news event. We figured that a United bankruptcy, and other airlines' widely-reported financial struggles, would be wanting to know the answer to this one basic question, and its subsidiary questions. And since I've been covering the airline industry for nearly 20 years and have written a book on the subject, Judi figured I was the go to do this story. And, truth be told, I really had to do very little additional research. Most of the specific data cited in the story was already in hand or had appeared in the paper previously. All of the information that went into the answers were from interviews already done over the previous weeks for other stories or for general backgrounding and reporting purposes. And some of it, frankly, just came from my own knowledge gained from two decades of covering the industry. It pays, sometimes, to have experts assigned to beats, and this is an example of that. We at USAT talk a lot about writing authoritatively. And this is a prime example of that. The paper's credibility, and mine, carry this story, not the named sources in the story (there are none).
The second story, "Don't Expect Rivals to Pounce on United," wasn't quite so easy. But again, this was built on basic reporting done in the course of covering a beat, not a lot of new reporting done specifically for this story. The idea of the story was obviously simple: What will competitors do in response to a United bankruptcy and any shrinkage of service?" Yet it's exactly that kind of story we want to be able to write, because it answers one of the prime questions readers typically have after reading a news story that says "XYZ corp. is going bankrupt," especially if they depend on XYZ to meet their needs. Again, most of the information in the story were already in hand when we decided to do the story. That info was gathered from just plain ol' daily beat coverage, which these days includes reading every report and study that comes out and evaluating its meaning and calling up the analyst/consultant/ whoever with follow-up questions and making him/her defend their position. Based on that already available information, I did 5-6 additional interviews to make sure the points being made were valid and shared, to some degree, by a reasonable number of experts... and to get fresh, lively quotes.
In short, these are not great examples of investigative, ground-breaking reporting. Rather, they are, I think, good examples of exhaustive beat reporting can bring to the table in helping readers understand events and their broader impact on their own lives. And that's good newspapering, and good journalism, I believe. Everybody loves breaking the big, new investigative story. And we do our share of that. But these kinds of stories do wonders in solidifying readers' perception of USAT as THE place to turn for the best, most informative, most accessible news about business travel and the airline industry.
