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07/06/2022 08:30 AMWhen Chris Roush accepted the position of dean at Quinnipiac University’s School of Communications in 2019, he chose North Haven as his home so he could be close to the university’s Hamden campus.
Prior to his appointment as dean, he spent 17 years at UNC-Chapel Hill, where he was a Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor, senior associate dean, and director of the master’s program.
Over the past 24 years, Chris has published nine books. His 10th book, The Future of Business Journalism: Why It Matters for Wall Street and Main Street, will be published on July 1.
Born in Auburn, Alabama, Chris went to high school in suburban Atlanta, Georgia before returning to his hometown to earn his undergraduate degree at Auburn University. He then attended graduate school at the University of Florida.
Studying and writing about business is a love Chris says he fell into.
“When I was in high school and for most of my college career, I thought I was going to be a sports reporter or a sports announcer,” recalls Chris. “When I got out of grad school and realized I needed a job, and the first job I got was as a business reporter for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune in Florida and I fell in love with business journalism.”
Chris’s first book about business was Inside Home Depot, which was published in 1998.
“I covered Home Depot for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution,” Chris says. After writing several articles about the popular home improvement retailer for the Journal he was surprised to learn that no one had written a book about the rise and tremendous success of the Home Depot business model.
“It was one of the largest retailers in the world, even at that time, and yet no one had written a book about them,” says Chris.
When Chris was growing up in Atlanta, he lived about two miles from one of the first Home Depot stores, before the chain dramatically expanded. “It opened in 1979,” Chris says, and notes, “If I had invested in Home Depot when they went public a couple years later, you and I would not be talking right now because I would be retired.”
Such is the nature of highly successful businesses that fascinate Chris and inspire him to write about their history.
When Chris writes about a publicly traded company, he never purchases the stock as a matter of ethics. “As a business journalist, it’s really not ethical to invest in or buy stocks in companies that you cover or might cover,” Chris notes. As a result, Chris has only owned one stock in his life “and that was a stock I got when my grandfather died,” he says, adding, “All my other investments are mutual funds and retirement plans.”
As a business journalist, Chris says he writes two kinds of books. “I write histories of companies, and with those books, I examine the strategy of a company and what makes it successful, what were its issues and how did they overcome those issues, and I examine how a particular company is run. So, if anyone was interested in how a company was successful, they would read one of those books.”
The second type of book Chris writes is on the subject of business journalism, which includes a history of business journalism, and his newest book, published in early July, The Future of Business Journalism, looks at what’s good and what’s bad in business journalism today. The book explains how to fix those problems and why fixing those problems are so important to society.
“The news media spends way too much time in coverage of the stock market, even though 90 percent of all stock are owned by the top 10 percent of the U.S. population,” Chris explains as an example of a business journalism problem that needs fixing.
“Most people really don’t care or need to know what happens in the stock market on a daily basis. It’s not good for them to trade in the stock market on a daily basis and frankly, if they did, their portfolio would lose money according to research. So why does the news media have to publish a stock market story every day? They don’t,” states Chris.
Of the nine prior books Chris has published, he feels his current book is profoundly important because of the number of businesses in the U.S., and how those businesses affect American society and culture.
“There are 30 million businesses in the United States and 320 million consumers,” explains Chris, “and 99 percent of those businesses and consumers are not getting the news and information they need to make important decisions, either about their business or about their own lives, and that’s what this book is trying to address.
“If I’m a Fortune 500 company or a big company like Facebook or Amazon,” continues Chris, “the business media covers me every single day and everything you ever wanted to know about those companies, but that’s not what most people and most business owners need in terms of their business news and information.”
Chris says he calls this chasm “the dissemination divide,” and that the people who need that high-end business news about Amazon or Facebook can get it, “but the vacuum repair shop in Wallingford that I take my vacuum to for repair is not getting the business news they need [to help them with their business] from any news organization,” he says.
As a solution, Chris suggests that national news outlets need to provide business news coverage that affects Main Street and focus less on Wall Street.
When it comes to the North Haven community, where Chris and his wife, Shannon, a healthcare professional, have made their home for the past three years, he says he chose North Haven to live for a few reasons. It’s close to the QU campus in Hamden, “and it’s convenient to shopping areas on Washington Avenue and I’m probably there three or four times a week,” he says.
“All of our kids are grown and living back in North Carolina,” Chris says,
Of the new book—published by Georgetown University Press—Chris says the editor contacted him after reading his history of journalism book, Profits and Losses.
“She wondered what changes had taken place in the 15 years since that book first appeared, Chris says, adding, “She hit me at the right time, because I had been thinking that business journalism has gone downhill in the past decade, in terms of the value it’s providing to society. So, I gave her an elevator pitch of what needed to be written about business journalism today. She took it to her bosses, and they bought it.”
Nine months later, the manuscript was done, thanks to the COVID stay-at-home order.
“I was sitting at home a lot on weekends, so I call this my COVID book, and it kept me occupied and sane during COVID,” Chris says and laughs, adding, “There was only so much I could do to run a communications school from my house, so this book kept me sane nights, weekend, and during breaks from online teaching.”
To read Chris’s new book, visit your local bookstore or visit www.amazon.com and search for The Future of Business Journalism by Chris Rouch.