Veteran financial writer Melissa Preddy served as a business writer, editor and columnist for The Detroit News from 1995 to 2008, is a Michigan-based freelance journalist. Follow her daily posts.
Hard to believe that most of us in the United States will spring our clocks forward on March 14.
(Or, if you’re like me, you’ll shove one timepiece into EDT and get around to the rest sometime before the Kentucky Derby.)
Either way, it seems as though we were just luxuriating in that extra hour of sleep [...]
You think Toyotas with rogue throttles are scary?
Try Pringles with salmonella.
Over the past few days news of another possibly widespread food recall has broken, and your readers will be wondering how it affects them. While you’re at it, you might want to develop a broader piece on food inspection, retail and restaurant inspection and other [...]
I barely know a basketball hoop from a goal post but even for the athletically clueless, it’s a given that March Madness is one of the year’s peaks for sports marketing, consumerism and office betting pools.
With Selection Sunday less than a week away, you’ll want to plan at least a couple of features between now [...]
We’ve all received those calls and e-mails extending chipper invitations – with interview opportunities! – to an awards ceremony to honor the Midwest Mortician of the Year or the new inductees to a sales representatives’ billion-dollar club.
“Thanks so much, but I expect to be ‘on deadline’ that night,” you murmur, grateful for the vague and [...]
We’ll be getting a fresh federal update on the nation’s unemployment rate tomorrow and most prognosticators expect a bigger decline in payrolls than we saw for January, with bad weather among the factors delaying the job market’s recovery.
Be sure to check out the state and metro area data on employment, hours and earnings, too, when [...]
With the countdown to Sunday’s presentation of the 82nd Academy Awards underway, now might be a good time to produce a blockbuster feature yourself, focusing on new developments affecting local movie theaters and related industries.
It’s a fun, kind of glamorous story that will give you a welcome break from chronicling unemployment, bank failures and plunging [...]
A few months here ago in Michigan, experts at an economic summit concluded that the state may not recoup recession-lost jobs for some 20 years.
That news actually came as something of a relief to local analysts, who feared that several generations would pass before the state’s job market rebounded to levels it [...]
The tragic earthquake in Chile may be a hemisphere away, but the economic ripples still could reach your backyard.
With casualty reports still coming in and a recovery effort under way, the less urgent ramifications of the temblor won’t be assessed for a while. But business journalists may want to delve around for local impact.
Chile’s coastal [...]
From Washington orchids to Nebraska corn to Massachusetts cranberries, agricultural products are big business in just about every region we cover.
Some crops, of course, are grown year-round, but as major spring planting season looms, it’s a good time to pluck some business features from your local soil.
Agriculture makes up roughly 16 percent of the U.S. [...]
