In the incestuous world of New York’s  business publications, there’s a lot of movement from one to the other. When Larry Ingrassia recently headed uptown to The New York Times after 25 years at The Wall Street Journal, he recognized a lot of faces of writers and editors who had made the same migration before him. At the WSJ, where he was the assistant managing editor in charge of global coverage of financial markets, Ingrassia guided his team to two Pulitzer Prizes. Moving to the Times a month ago, he became the daily's new business editor, succeeding Glenn Kramon, who had been promoted to associate managing editor. It was a busy time to make the jump. In his first month, Ingrassia has directed coverage of the Martha Stewart case, the Comcast-Disney saga, and the whole flap over indecency on television arising from Janet Jackson's Super Bowl breast-baring. Ingrassia talks to Media Life about his vision for the Times business section, the Stewart trial and, of course, Jayson Blair.

1. With increased competition from the internet, and even your own company’s site, how do you keep people reading the daily newspaper?

   By breaking news you can’t get elsewhere.
   There are two ways to break news. There’s the traditional scoop, an exclusive about a development with a company or in the economy, and breaking that news before anyone else does. 
   The second exclusive is called an idea exclusive. It’s similar but not necessarily what’s considered a traditional scoop. 
  It’s doing an analytical trend story and spotting it before anyone else, putting it in context, and explaining the world to our readers in ways they hadn’t thought of before. The internet doesn’t do that, except in very few places, and certainly not consistently.

2. Some newspapers have spun off versions for young, apparently attention deficit disordered readers. What do you think of those editions, business-wise, and why or why don’t they work? Is it something the Times would look at?

   Clearly newspapers face a challenge the next decade to make sure that younger people turn to them for things they need to know. The advantage that the New York Times has, as do other publications like The Wall Street Journal, is that we are writing for an audience that is intellectually curious about the world around them, and that includes the world of business, finance and economics.
   So we don’t have to be all things to all people.
   We have to be enough things to enough people to expand our audience and ideally expand our influence. 
   I think other newspapers may face a bigger challenge because it’s much easier for a young person who likes bite-sized tabloid journalism -- and not to make a judgment about them -- to get their information from television or the internet. 
   It’s a lot harder to get the type of information that we have, whether it’s scoops or ideas or analysis, from free papers, from television, the internet.

3. What have some of the challenges of covering the Martha Stewart trial been?

    Martha Stewart, the indictment of the CEO of Enron -- the reason that the Times and other publications pay so much attention to this is that these stories are not just business stories. These are stories that cut to the heart of corporate ethics and touch a lot of people’s lives. 
   They’ve lost money because of the breakdown of corporate ethics during the bubble years, and a lot of jobs have been lost because the companies were run into the ground. 
   A lot of executives of companies left with millions of dollars because of the stock options they exercised, and sold stock before companies tanked, or from very lucrative severance packages they got even though the company was in trouble. 
   So these are not personality stories, though some of the personalities are larger than life and very interesting to our readers. These are issue stories, and the biggest issue is how business is done and how it ought to be done.
   Our readers are very interested in that. Some of these allegations are very difficult to prove. It’s difficult to get a conviction because it’s unclear what happened, in the Tyco trial, in the Martha Stewart trial, in the trial of the Rigas family members.

4. You obviously had read about the Jayson Blair scandal before you took the job. What do you see at the Times that is a reaction to Blair, and how are editors making sure the same thing won’t happen again?

   There’s a credibility issue that the press has to be constantly aware of. Credibility is what we have, and without that we have nothing.
   Everyone here is extremely cognizant of that, and I think that this is underscored by this incident.

5. What do you predict the big media stories of 2004 will be?

   Media consolidation in broadcast television and cable, in entertainment, and how that plays out. You see it in the effort by Comcast to acquire Disney. 
   There’s consolidation going on. How that proceeds and the extent to which it affects consumers of entertainment, news and information is a hugely important story. 
  Second, and more of a business story, is to what extent will advertising for newspapers and magazines start coming back. 
   It started last year, but it’s still below 1999 and 2000, and clearly that’s affected a lot of publications.