Mental Gymnastics

To be a good reporter you need to know a little bit about a lot of things and a lot about nothing. But as I've learned recently, even learning that little bit can be a mind boggling experience.

I'll admit it -- part of the appeal of taking this job was the cachet of being a financial reporter in the world's biggest financial center. Yes, business in general and finance in particular can be difficult to understand and boil down into 750 words of prose, but hey, how much harder can it be than turning tech into plain English?

That was before I knew what plain English meant in SEC regulatory parlance.

The past two weeks have been a sisyphean challenge to understand the mundane and archane aspects of mutual fund technology and operations and turn it into something readers, and editors for that matter, can appreciate. It also requires a slight re-working of 24 years of right-brain thinking. There was a reason why I didn't take AP Calculus in high school.

Sitting at my desk fretting over blinking red track changes and the specter of angry quants and their prickly handlers dissecting every word, I had flashbacks to starting at the BBJ. Alone, nervous/neurotic, and without a clue what I was walking into, those first few weeks (or months) of a new beat are not necessarily indicative of future performance. But it's cold comfort when you write a clunker of a story.

Unlike prior experiences, though, I have some confidence that I'll find my way around this totally foreign environment. It's going to take some time and lots of mental gymnastics, but as a great professor once said "It doesn't matter if you're covering the president or the Red Sox, reporting is reporting. It's the same skill sets."