Andrew Ross Sorkin on the Origins, and the Future, of DealBook

Photo

Andrew Ross Sorkin was a 24-year-old mergers and acquisitions reporter for The New York Times when, in 2001, he began sending a daily email roundup to his readers. He called it “DealBook.”

Now, almost 17 years later, DealBook is an integral part of The Times’s news report — and has expanded its coverage in print, on the web and through an annual conference.

In the meantime, Mr. Sorkin, who first wrote for The Times while still in high school, has written a best-selling book (“Too Big to Fail”), won two Gerald Loeb Awards and helped create a television series, “Billions,” for Showtime. He is also a co-anchor of Squawk Box, a financial news program on CNBC.

What follows is a lightly edited Q. and A. about the origins — and the future — of DealBook, which relaunched in November.

_____

The Times recently relaunched DealBook, the daily financial report that you started back in 2001. What’s new? What kinds of changes can DealBook readers expect?

We’re expanding our mandate to become a smartly curated, one-stop shop for all the day’s key business and policy news and analysis in real time.

The business world is now inextricably linked with policy — in Washington, in Brussels, in Beijing — in a way that it has never been before. Corporate C.E.O.s and investors increasingly spend as much time in D.C. as they do on Wall Street. Business has become politics. And politics is business.

That’s why we’re relaunching DealBook with a renewed focus on the intersection of these crosscurrents, leveraging the entire reporting staff of The New York Times for our deeply loyal reader base of influential business and policy leaders and an expanding global audience.

We’re going to be touching on everything from lobbying to technology to taxes to automation’s impact on jobs to the business community’s approach to climate change.

Our goal is to bring readers unique insights and exclusive behind-the-scenes details about the day’s most important headlines. And of course, we will continue to cover the world of deal making and finance.

DealBook originally launched as an informal daily newsletter. What prompted you to begin sending it?

It was 2001. The Times had just asked me to move back from London, where I had been covering mergers in Europe for the paper, to New York to take over the merger beat here.

Photo

As I went around meeting people on Wall Street, it occurred to me that many of them were spending as much of the day as I did trying to piece together various news reports, to stay up-to-date. I figured there could be value in curating a daily report that put all of the news together from all sorts of news sources, and in prioritizing the news in a way that made sense for this audience.

Back then, the idea of linking to a competitor, whether it be The Wall Street Journal or The Financial Times, was considered treasonous. Blogging was in its infancy. And the real insight was to send the report by email every morning, putting it at the top of everyone’s inbox when they woke up.

Back then, by the way, we used to get requests to send the newsletter by fax!

Can you walk us through DealBook’s evolution from a newsletter into what it is today — a multiplatform financial news report?

Over time, as our readership increased from a couple hundred to over 300,000, DealBook moved from being put together by me in my pajamas at home at 5 in the morning, supported by a small team, to a larger and larger team. We started our website in 2006 and began doing much more original reporting and offering analysis throughout the day. In 2010, we grew even bigger.

Along the way, we added an annual conference, a daily page in the newspaper, two annual special sections and more.

One of the best parts of this project: We’ve been able to hire some amazingly talented people over the years, many of whom now populate all different parts of the paper. Among them: Susanne Craig (who famously got President Trump’s old tax records in the mail); Azam Ahmed, the bureau chief for Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean; Ben Protess, who now covers the Trump administration and its potential conflicts of interests; Kevin Roose, our newest business columnist with The Shift; Alexandra Stevenson, a correspondent in Hong Kong; and Adrienne Carter, who is now the deputy business editor.

Michael Schmidt, a star in our Washington bureau, did some writing for us early on in his career — as did Thomas Kaplan, who now covers Congress and was once on loan to us as a summer intern. Michael J. de la Merced, our most prolific DealBook writer and a mainstay of the report, started working with us all the way back in 2006.

The Times now offers more than 50 newsletters. When did you first suspect that the platform might grow to be an integral part of The Times’s offerings?

The Times was pretty early in developing email newsletters. However, many were just automated lists of headlines. It was the addition of truly original writing and reporting that really elevated The Times’s newsletters in recent years.

Readers have gravitated to email newsletters — they’re the best way to cut through the overwhelming nature of everything online.

You were an early proponent of several platforms that have since become daily elements in The Times’s news report: newsletters, aggregation, live streams. What’s your secret to staying on top of — and learning to utilize — new platforms? And in a broad sense, how have these kinds of new technologies affected the way you, and other journalists, approach your work?

For me, I have always been driven by trying to figure out what the reader wants — and what they need.

Whenever I finish an interview for a story, I often ask this series of questions: “What do you read? What’s wrong with it? What’s missing? What do you wish you had that you don’t have?”

Everything that I’ve ever built has come from trying to fulfill the answers to those questions.