When only one story matters, what happens?

Last week I gave you a snapshot of my roles and responsibilities. This week I dive into how I cover breaking news — specifically one outside my beat that dominates all headlines.

The sun was setting behind the Statue of Liberty when news of the assassination attempt on former President Trump broke. I was in Redhook, on the Louis Valentino, Jr. Pier in Brooklyn, looking out at the water before my phone lit up with alerts.

• Our small but mighty Axios newsroom, led by our breaking news and politics teams, had activated and assembled like the Avengers to cover the developments. Other reporters and editors monitored Slack and shared additional reporting carefully to avoid interrupting the flow of coordination and communication underway.

Zoom in: As a business journalist, I knew it wasn't my story to cover that Saturday.

• But I also knew from covering big, global events in the past for CNN that public interest in the wider implications of the political tragedy would crescendo.

• So, when I jumped into Slack too, I joined to observe and learn from my colleagues as well as to provide moral support. (The right emoji reaction can convey a lot.)

Context: Breaking news always stirs up a bit of adrenaline, but when a story of this magnitude hits, a sense of duty to report kicks in and that feeling takes over my entire body.

• Taking action — to call sources, to write — is the only thing my mind wants to do.

The intrigue: Resisting that instinct, for me, is critical when the story is not my story.

• Why? Because jumping on an adjacent angle too early distracts internal resources and external audiences from the core questions news orgs need to answer in the immediate aftermath of an incident: What is happening? What do we know?

• Anything else would be an incomplete piece with a short shelf life. Not super valuable. (And not my preference, which I'll write about in a future post.)

My approach: That night as I absorbed reporting from my team and other news sources online and on TV, I anticipated potential angles that would emerge when businesses got back to work on Monday.

• CEOs had started weighing in already, which meant the story crossed into my beat. But I didn't want to simply aggregate their statements. A more valuable piece, I thought, would be to explain why they're speaking up. Maybe the reason was obvious, maybe it wasn't — I had to find out so I started working with my colleague Eleanor Hawkins and calling sources Sunday morning and afternoon.

• By then, I also knew that markets overseas would react in some way, so I decided to stay up all night tracking Asia and European investor sentiments online and on Bloomberg. (I knew U.S. business media would not cover those angles come 6 a.m.)

• Both stories — global markets expecting a second Trump term and why CEOs condemned the violence — published early Monday and I also put them in my afternoon newsletter.

• To me those were the biggest business implications on day 2 of the news. But toward the end of the day, my colleague Sarah Grillo flagged to me that pro-Trump merchandise was trending on Amazon. While not surprising, it was the use of the "Evan photo" of Trump with his fist in the air that made her discovery more significant: Photographers were concerned the viral picture would be taken to symbolize the campaign, and those fears materialized with online shopping data to prove it.

• That was the third and final piece of July 15 before I packed it in for the night.

The big picture: My job starts before a single word is written — with observation and judgement and evaluation of what a story needs at a given moment and what value (if any) I can provide in those moments.

The bottom line: The story comes first.

I hope you enjoyed this post. More to come in future editions about the importance of collaboration.

Stay cool,

Hope

1 fun fact: Hoek Pizza is excellent. But skip the meatball "sub."