Cyrillic Partners

Brian Caulfield, a mentor and friend, let me in on a secret to good magazine journalism: stories should be surprising and have a point of view.

There are two ways to come up with a surprising story. One may “break” news by getting a scoop, or unveil some hidden insight. Scoops are pretty straight forward and the providence of the best magazines and newspapers. Insight is a little trickier to grasp, however.

When we worked together at a business magazine, Brian and I came up with several basic flavors of insight that might be applied to any news story:

1.  Forward Spin: Come up with some analysis of what’s going to happen next. If one company buys another, what might be the next corporate pairing in their market? What will a company’s competitors have to do to counter its new measures? What is this news going to mean for investors down the road? Will the company be able to hit its earnings numbers next quarter?
2. Pearl Necklace: Is the piece of news one in a series of similar events? Is it worth pointing out that deal X is the third such deal that’s happened in the past month or that involved the same investors?
3. Bunch of Grapes: Is this piece of news fundamentally demonstrative of a much larger trend? Is it one particularly succulent grape from a much larger bunch?
4. Lessons Learned: Business person X just did amazing thing Y. If you want to do the same sort of amazing thing, you should take note of these key lessons.
5. Reality Inversion: Take what everyone believes to be true, turn it upside down and look for examples or proof. Everyone believes a recession is bad, for example. Invert this commonly accepted maxim to get that “a recession is good,” then find who that’s true for. Recessions are great for people in the repossession business and generally improve sales at liquor stores. Profile these thriving businesses when a recession hits.

I particularly like the “Reality Inversion” principle for coming up with interesting stories and like to use it to test out various theories and try to use it as frequently as possible.  In a recent conversation with one of my coworkers, I started off by saying: “Well known investor X isn’t really that good.” Which lead to a very interesting discussion of what makes a good investor based on a very different point of view. Even if you end up throwing out the inversion, it forces you to think in creative and different ways.

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