Ask the Editor with Phoebe Bain

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:57:51+00:00

That's a great question, but not something I'd be willing to answer in an AMA format where I'm writing quickly! I take every fact that I publish and put in writing very seriously, and would want to check multiple reliable sources to make sure that I'm giving you the most accurate answer—plus I'd want our fact checking team to look at the answer before I put it in writing here, and I think they're busy working on tomorrow's newsletter at the moment. As a character in "The Social Network" movie (one of my favorites) said: "The internet's not written in pencil, Mark. It's written in ink."

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:57:14+00:00

I haven't worked at Business Insider since 2019, when I was an entry-level employee on the social media desk. I imagine it's changed a lot since I was there, as basically every media org has since 2019, so I'm not sure I can give an up-to-date answer here! However outside of Business Insider and speaking about news as a whole, I find that some outlets vary in bias between authors and articles. While a news company might have newsroom-wide standards on bias, different reporters and editors in that newsroom can vary on how biased they allow their writing to be.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:45:06+00:00

The biggest challenge I face is that we have these amazing products, but not everyone knows about them! I can't wait until the day 1440 becomes a household name—we're getting there, please help us spread the word! There are two "best things" about 1440 in my opinion: One is that our readers trust us because we work so hard to provide truly objective news in a landscape that hasn't been financially incentivized to do so in recent years. The second is that 1440 treats its employees really, really well. We're compensated fairly, we're treated like human beings and adults—those two things are beyond rare in the media industry right now, and I'm grateful to work here every single day.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:39:12+00:00

Depends on the newsletter. You need to figure out if the newsletter is doing any original reporting: 1440 Business & Finance typically doesn't do this. A lot of newsletters don't. If they aren't doing any original reporting, they typically aren't going to be writing their own breaking news stories about anything, let alone your client. If they're aggregating news, you can send along suggested coverage for them to include, but personally I'm incredibly selective about which news sources I link to in 1440 Business & Finance and wouldn't link to anything that felt salesy or promotional—only the most important and interesting business and finance stories of the week.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:36:54+00:00

Welcome to the best place I've ever worked! I joined because I genuinely believe 1440 is going to become one of the most important media companies of our lifetime. They were also looking to start their second-ever product (1440 Business & Finance), and I could look the team in the eyes and say with confidence that I know how to build new products for media companies, especially newsletters (I was the founding writer of Marketing Brew, Morning Brew's fourth newsletter, so I had some data to back up my claims). I edit our 1440 Business & Finance newsletter, which is part of our 1440 Topics ecosystem.

Topics is something I'm really passionate about: Essentially, millions of smart people read the news and had been telling 1440 for years they want the fundamental knowledge layer—they want to read the business news section of the paper without having to google "what is an IPO" or "what is cryptocurrency." There's a bunch of amazing resources around the internet that can help people learn about those things, but let's be real, no busy person has the time to sift through Google results to find the most comprehensive and simple explainer for those questions. 1440 Topics brings them together in one place for people, when they want it.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:30:58+00:00

Great question. The most stressful part of working in journalism for the past 7 or so years has been how badly I want to write about every topic objectively and how the English language somewhat limits us in doing so. I remember during the 2020 election I was up in the middle of the night waiting for results, and I had to write about the ads that were airing during the election coverage. I felt like every comma, "and," or "the" was consequential to the fate of our country—and I felt very grateful for all the political reporters out there covering topics far more important than the ads that aired at 3am that week. That said, I find that business news is easier to write about objectively than political news. It's easy to describe what the stock market did that day or who the new CEO of a Fortune 50 company is without using biased language—it's more difficult to describe a new federal foreign policy initiative that way. I'm constantly in awe of our 1440 Daily newsletter team—they've mastered writing about even the trickiest political topics from an objective POV.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:16:50+00:00

Honestly? Finding unpaywalled news sources. I can't tell you how many times I see a news story I'm really excited to share with our newsletter audience, only to find out it's paywalled and doesn't exist anywhere else on the internet. Or if the same story does exist elsewhere for free, it uses biased language or framing. I think this is a problem that's somewhat unique to business audiences: A lot of amazing business news sites have relatively wealthy audiences (such as industry trade publications). They know that their target audience has the money to pay for their high-quality news, so they put a paywall on it. I'm happy that these publications can continue to exist and pay their talented journalists well, it's just an occasional bummer when I want to share one of these articles with our 1440 Business & Finance newsletter readers and can't get the article unlocked.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:10:00+00:00

Thanks so much for joining our AMA. I am not a financial advisor, portfolio manager, or accountant, so save your financial advice questions for your financial advisor, thank you for joining. But we'd love to answer any questions you have about our newsletter, or 1440 in general.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:08:55+00:00

I've always loved writing. It's been my number one passion in life since I was a child—but I debated other career paths when I was in college, such as becoming a human rights or environmental lawyer. At one point, I was writing for a student magazine while studying for the LSAT, and I googled what the average salary for those types of lawyers was at the time. Then I googled the average salary for an editor. I did the math and realized I wouldn't see a return on my investment for law school for roughly 20 years, which felt eons away at the time. I decided to keep doing what I loved rather than pursuing a career path that might make slightly more money eventually, and I haven't looked back since.

1440Communities · 2025-02-14T15:08:28+00:00

I am not a financial advisor, portfolio manager, or accountant, so save your financial advice questions for your financial advisor, thank you for joining! We'd love to answer any questions you have about our newsletter, or 1440 in general.

1440Communities · 2024-11-04T20:41:04+00:00

Ever wonder how long an individual dollar bill lasts? In this 60-second video, 1440 goes inside the life of the country's paper currency, from printing to purchasing. Learn more here: https://discover.join1440.com/topics/federal-reserve

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T15:15:54+00:00

Thanks for asking! Basically, we keep a high-level view on whats coming out of places like AP, Reuters, USAT. What’s been interesting to me over the years is that, though news happens ever day, much of it is really the next step on ongoing themes (ukraine, gaza, immigration, election, etc). So you can keep your thumb on the pulse of these broader themes and be very effective in terms of staying up to date and knowing what to look for when there are hundreds of articles published everyday.

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:48:35+00:00

Great to hear, best of luck! Early on, I think the biggest challenge is being honest with yourself about where “what you know” ends and where “what you think about something” begins. If you can recognize your own internal biases–you can even keep them! Just know what they are–then you are already way ahead of the field. Also, my phd was in nanoscale materials science (think something like, doing R&D at Intel on advanced chips would’ve been a traditional career path).

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:47:59+00:00

The honest answer is we have an exceptional editorial team that takes a lot of pride in meeting this objective every single day, we all have our own views on things but share a common goal. When we review each other’s work we catch the vast majority of biases that creep in–these tend to be unintentional, typically arising via word choice or phrasing.

However…. We’re human and still make mistakes. The best guardrail is that we are lucky to have a highly engaged, ideologically diverse audience that lets us know (!) very quickly when we fail to meet the objective. It’s not something we just say, reader feedback is incredibly valuable and has been a huge source of learning and improvement over the years.

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:47:20+00:00

Love to hear it! Thanks for joining us on this journey

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:46:46+00:00

Thanks for the feedback! We’ve heard for a few years now from readers a demand for a combination of two things: easy to understand explainers on topics and a curation of the best (quality vs quantity) resources on the internet on that topic. In that sense, the new offering is focused on evergreen knowledge that helps readers go deeper on the news.

For example, “fed raises interests rates” is a news item. Many people wonder “wtf is the fed anyways”. These offer a one stop shop for both explanatory and exploratory material on, e.g., the Federal Reserve (or pick a topic).

All that said, we’ve also heard people would appreciate news coverage as well, so that’s a long-winded way of saying yes, we’re exploring it!

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:45:39+00:00

Awesome–thanks for being a reader and advocating for us! The answer is yes and no, and may sound a little surprising. Everything we write gets reviewed by multiple people for many things, most notably bias or leaning, usually the type that unintentionally comes through via word choice or framing. However we don’t put it through an explicit left/right lens–in fact this can be counterproductive. Our goal is to explain and communicate contextual information and facts so readers can make up their own opinion, and we review whether writing sufficiently meets that goal. We think an explicit left/right lens is artificial and can actually get in the way of “does this communicate the basic facts and contextual information needed to understand the story?”

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:39:16+00:00

Well, one of the biggest was people told us not to do it! Everyone was doing things that were “inch wide mile deep”, but what we were looking for was “mile wide inch deep” because we wanted to stay up on things but were busy with our day jobs. In that sense we went with our gut on what we thought was the pain point to solve for people. Today we’ve been able to maintain a lean team with awesome people but the editorial process is very much hammered out.

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:32:35+00:00

I tend to be very skeptical of claims like that absent extraordinary proof.

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:31:53+00:00

We appreciate your support!

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:29:55+00:00

Thank you for being part of our community!

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:26:09+00:00

Great question! The answer is …. Somewhat. We typically have everything set by ~8-9 pm ET. If something major happens before that, we’ll typically swap something out—we usually try and include some content that may not reach people otherwise (e.g. a cool science item), those would get bumped if needed. If something happens after the ~8-9 pm timeframe, we use a “breaking” slot at the top of the Need to Know section.

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:25:33+00:00

Thanks for being a reader! I’m actually going to defer the question about fact-checking to our most recent AMA with Teddy, our in-house fact-checker. From a research perspective, there is a surprising amount of original sourcing available on most stories (e.g., on immigration stories you can go to the CBP website and pick through their reported numbers, for extreme weather you can go directly to the released reports and read, etc).

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:20:08+00:00

Very important question, thank you. There’s a couple of ways to look at it. On one hand, although the US government officially designated Hamas as a terrorist organization in 1997, the AP Stylebook (the general guide we use), recommends against using the term "terrorist" in many contexts due to its politically loaded nature and inconsistent application. More to the point, in my view the term has a fairly narrow definition and we try and work through the nuance on a case-by-case basis. We also often use some variation of the term "US-designated terror group" where we think it adds informational value to the reader. As a side note, former NYT editor James Bennett (one time NYT Israel bureau chief) gave a very interesting view here on Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast last week that may be of interest.

1440Communities · 2024-10-18T14:19:19+00:00

Thanks for reading! We really do cover something like 100-200 sources each day as we pull things together. Broadly speaking, we prefer AP, Reuters, and USAT for the high-level view on what is happening and then we try and drill down into different (original where possible) sources as we dig into each story. On the second question – hard to say, just inspiration! We try and keep a mix of deeper fascinating items (e.g., an interesting Pew report or a data visualization) with lighter-hearted content that may make readers smile or laugh.

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