CNBC's Jim Connor to Discuss How Business News is Covered, April 26
April 19, 2007
April 19, 2007, Greencastle, Ind. - Jim Connor, assistant managing editor for for cable television's business news network, CNBC, will bring his insights to the campus of DePauw University on Thursday, April 26. In a Gertrude and G.D. Crain Jr. Lecture, Connor will discuss "How the 'Business News' Gets on CNBC," at 4:15 p.m. in the Pulliam Center for Contemporary Media's Watson Forum. The public is invited to attend this free event.
A veteran of more thirty years in television news, Connor has served at all levels: local station, network, cable, and public broadcasting. For much of his career, Connor produced national news stories and programs for NBC News and CNN, covering policy and politics in Washington and around the country, traveling with Presidents to Iceland, India 
and many places in between. Now he supervises coverage of the economic forces that affect our world.
Throughout the business day, CNBC covers the exchanges and markets -- stocks, bonds, oil, commodities, currencies. CNBC also reports on the government institutions that affect the economy directly -- the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Department, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Food and Drug Administration; and the Congressional committees that legislate tax and spending policy, banking regulation, housing etc. CNBC also follows specific companies and sectors in the economy: autos and aviation; big pharmaceutical firms and the biotechs; technology; media and entertainment; and mergers and acquisitions.
At CNBC, Connor's duties include managing reporters and producers as they cover today's news and plan for tomorrow's.
"CNBC's unique audience of CEO's, Wall Streeters, hedge fund execs and active traders come to us for information, insight and breaking economic news," says Connor. "They have expectations and have made investments -- bets, really -- based on how they believe the economy in its many parts will perform. When those expectations change, that's news."
Endowed by Rance Crain, president of Crain Communications and a member of DePauw's Class of 1960, The Gertrude and G.D. Crain Jr. Lecture Series honors Mr. Crain's parents. Previous Crain Lecturers have included: Pulitzer Prize winning author Richard Ford; the seniors on DePauw's national championship women's basketball team; Sarah Shepherd, senior producer for CNN's Larry King Live and 1997 
graduate of DePauw University; Tim McCaughan '93, senior White House producer for CNN; David Keene, chair of the American Conservative Union, and Roger Wilkins, a noted civil rights leader, historian, and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist; Father Richard P. McBrien (pictured at right), Crowley-O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame and a consultant to ABC News for papal events; political analyst Charlie Cook; Wall Street Journal reporter Aaron Lucchetti '96; military sociologist Charles Moskos; Samantha Power, author of A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide; Emily Wax, Africa Bureau Chief of the Washington Post, and her husband, Raymond Thibodeaux, who also covers the region for Cox News, Voice of America and the Boston Globe; historian Douglas Brinkley, author of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War; and Joe Trippi, who managed Howard Dean's presidential campaign.