Andrew Ross Sorkin: The man behind Dealbook

In 2001, a little known New York Times business journalist, started emailing a few key contacts some links to the best financial stories that day, including both his colleagues’ and rivals’ articles.

The concept of ‘linking out’, and essentially promoting other publications’ work, was not common practice back then. However, Andrew Ross Sorkin, while sat in his ‘PJs’, as he describes it, was obviously on to something, as nine years on, The New York Times, has thrown its full weight behind ‘Dealbook’.

As of next Tuesday, November 9, what began life as just an daily financial email, will have a new website, mobile presence, full print page presence for four days of the week and a brand new team of 16, comprised of some of America’s top financial reporters. It will become the core part of The New York Times’s financial coverage with the hope of growing the existing 250,000 daily subscribers into a larger, and if possible, an even more influential collection of people.

“The list of subscribers reads like a who’s who of the Wall Street and international finance. It’s staggering who reads Dealbook every day,” gushes Sorkin, also the paper’s chief mergers and acquisitions reporter, as well as Dealbook’s editor.

However, Sorkin is not just on people’s radars because of Dealbook, as innovative as his use of technology was nearly a decade ago. He is also about to become a household name as his bestseller book, Too Big to Fail, which gives an astonishing minute by minute account of the recent financial crisis, is being made into a film for release next May. With Curtis Hanson directing, of LA Confidential fame, and a stellar cast comprising of the likes of Sex and the City’s Cynthia Nixon and Paul Giamatti, Sorkin, is about to hit the big time.

“I wrote the book to let people know what exactly happened when the financial system went into meltdown. I now hope the film will bring that story to even greater numbers of people in a very accessible way so that this major event is simplified and stops being such a mystery to so many.”

If Sorkin had hoped, through exposing the bad habits of the financial world, to bring about change in the way the Wall Street behaves, he has failed, by his own admission.

“The most disappointing thing for me is the way in which Wall Street hasn’t changed. Two years later, it’s still the same place. People are trying to be most responsible but ultimately the ethos hasn’t changed as Wall Street is about risk taking and no one has yet figured out what a responsible amount of risk is.”

Sorkin may have failed to have brought about any lasting reformation in the financial world through his writing, but he is part of new breed of entrepreneurial journalists, blazing an unmatchable trail in their respective areas of expertise and using the power of technology to do so. Nick Denton, a British financial journalist, has made a fortune out of his Gawker Media empire, an American blog network. Mike Allen now ‘owns’ politics through Politico. And Michael Arrington, editor and founder of TechCrunch, recently bought by AOL for $25m (£15m), has created the ‘go-to’ website for technology.

Sadly for Sorkin, he doesn’t even own single a share of his creation, despite calling himself Dealbook’s father. The New York Times owns the lot, so if it were ever to sell it on, he wouldn’t see any return. But despite missing that opportunity, Sorkin is excited about what opportunities technology offers media.

“More and more smaller entities, such as Politico or TechCrunch have been able to come out of nowhere and own entities. Dealbook, like them, now has an even greater opportunity, through additional resources, to drill down and offer even more breaking news and deep analysis of the issues that matter to our audience,” he explains.

And that’s how Sorkin thinks technology has really affected journalism. “Before the web and these highly focused entities, journalists got to decide what was important to tell their audience and educated their readers,” he explains.

“Now journalists have to try and understand what their consumer actually wants to read and what angle they are looking for in order to keep audiences engaged in a highly competitive world.”

Interestingly Sorkin is not against content aggregators, such as the hugely popular Huffington Post, which some more traditional hacks, perceive as being thieves of their content: cherry picking the best and giving it out for free on their site. He is, in fact in favour of them, as long as their ‘aggregate by hand’ and not through an algorithm of sorts.

“People want careful curation. When visiting a site or buying a newspaper, readers are buying into a sensibility, and that shouldn’t be destroyed by automation technology,” he says.

The New York Times is about to go back behind a paywall next year – but Sorkin, an original aggregator of the free web, is unsurprisingly not anti the move of the his employer, because it is a ‘permeable’ wall – i.e. people will still be able to access individual articles through aggregators such as Google, but will be forced to pay, if they want to ‘mosey around the rest of the site’, as Sorkin words it. This is as opposed to a hard paywall, which totally blocks aggregators and doesn’t allow the reader any articles for free, such as the one recently erected by The Times in the UK.

“Hard paywalls will never work because, just like at a newsstand, the reader likes to browse the cover and a few articles, before choosing to buy. Even if the material is truly unique, a consumer likes to try a little before buying,” says Sorkin.

Dealbook, he hints will be given an initial reprieve from the paywall, while the newly expanded version grows its audience from the email service, over to the site.

Despite Dealbook significantly raising his profile, Sorkin fundamentally believes technology hasn’t changed journalism. He still spends most of his day actually hunting news stories, as opposed to film producing or authoring more books.

“Great stories are still just great yarns. News remains the best human drama ever. Technology is not changing the story; it is just changing the way in which we deliver it. Now you break in a story in three parts, over a much quicker period of time. It’s all about real-time updates.”

But in an age where the financial model of print journalism is under threat – does Sorkin believe that most journalists should become entrepreneurial about their trade? And take more responsibility for monetising their content? In short: he has mixed views.

“Some of the best journalism comes from people knee deep in their area and aren’t able to look at the bigger picture or even think about the business side of their publication,” he says.

“At the same time, it is good to have other journalists around the hoop having such business-focussed thoughts. I wouldn’t suggest that every journalist needs to put on an entrepreneur’s cap, but there are opportunities out there for properly own your area in a way unimaginable 15 years ago.”

Sorkin believes the future for all media lies in the production of unique and incredibly thorough journalism as “everyone and their brother is now a content aggregator”. It’s about providing a unique service, which obviously Dealbook has proved itself to be.