Live From the Newsroom: Business Insider
Inside Business Insider’s 9:30 a.m. Editorial Meeting and the Machine Behind the Scoop
In January, I got an exclusive look inside one of the most dynamic newsrooms in media today: Business Insider. Curious how a modern newsroom actually operates—breaking news chaos, ringing phones, papers flying—those Hollywood clichés in my head were debunked, replaced by a highly coordinated, well-oiled operation led by Editor-in-Chief Jamie Heller and her team.
The day starts at 9:30 a.m. sharp.
No fluff. No small talk. Just a newsroom fully in motion.
The 9:30 a.m. Meeting: Where the Day Is Decided
Jamie Heller, editor-in-chief, and Steve Russolillo, chief news editor, lead a room (and Zoom) filled with top editors across the U.S., London, and Singapore.
The conversation moves fast and wide, with no topic left unturned:
Tariffs, legislation, data centers
Market-moving signals
Culture and lighter business moments
Real-time story development across verticals
Editors go team by team, pressure-testing ideas:
What’s the story?
Do we have sources?
What’s the angle no one else has?
Design is in the room, too.
“Can we get a chart for that?” “What might the visual look like?” Heller and Russolillo ask.
And perhaps the most telling signal of how BI operates:
Stories are already written on both sides of big-ticket decisions, ready to publish the millisecond a decision is made. Email alerts are blasted to subscribers, followed by deeply sourced and reported stories, in every format across platforms.
Speed is engineered here, and I’m impressed.
“We’re a 24/7 Shop”: The Global Handoff System
For Steve Russolillo, running a newsroom of 250 reporters across time zones is all about continuity.
“West Coast can pass to Singapore. Singapore to London. London back to New York. We’re always covered around the clock,” he confidently told me.
This is not just global coverage: It’s a relay system.
Pre-writes move across continents
Teams pick up stories mid-cycle, night and day
Coverage never stops
But speed alone isn’t the differentiator.
“The most important thing is giving our readers information that they cannot get elsewhere. We focus on scoops, insights, and getting inside companies. Our goal is to inform and educate readers, making them feel better prepared to approach the world day in and day out,” Russolillo said.
The Newsroom Runs as a Global Team, Not Silos
Cadie Thompson, deputy news chief, operationalizes that global flow.
Her day revolves around structured handoffs:
9:30 a.m. ET: Editorial Meeting
2 p.m. ET: West Coast takes over
8 p.m. ET: Singapore logs on
Emails, texts, and constant Slack threads tracking priorities ensue in between those moments.
She ensures that her reporters have the “Whats” down cold: “Here’s what happened. Here’s what we need. Here’s what’s next.”
Her team spans business news, corporate, finance, leadership and careers, legal affairs, and the West Coast and weekend team. They’re scrappy and well-sourced. “You can throw them in any direction, and they’ll find sources and move the story forward.”
Newsletters: Built Backwards from the Reader
If the morning meeting sets the agenda, newsletters are where BI sharpens its voice.
Akin Oyedele, deputy editor of newsletters, is clear:
“We never launch something because we should have it. It starts with what readers want.”
Oyedele told me, “We have very engaged audiences across verticals, so our approach is following the readers and making sure we’re servicing them, versus getting distracted on what is shiny or anew, and what we think we should have.”
Current and emerging products reflect that:
Business Insider Today, BI’s daily flagship newsletter, written by Dan DeFrancesco
Tech Memo, a deep dive inside the world of Big Tech, written by Alistair Barr
First Trade, an economic and financial markets guide, written by Joe Ciolli
CMO Insider, the inside scoop on the marketing and ad world, written by Lara O’Reilly
Vibe Mode, a weekly newsletter tracking the rise of vibe coding and what it means for work, startups, and the economy, edited by senior tech editor Rob Scammell
Valued, an upcoming newsletter on consumer intelligence, written by Bronwyn Barnes
The strategy is simple, yet rare: Follow the audience, not the format.
What Leads the Day? Data + Instinct
For Dan DeFrancesco, anchor of BI Today, picking the lead story is both art and science.
Data tells you what’s working
Instinct tells you what matters
Passion determines what resonates
And he guides his writers on a few principles: “I tell all the news writers: Focus on what you’re most passionate about and most interested in. What do you feel strongly about? Where do you have a strong take and can provide analysis and thoughtful perspective that’s going to come through and resonate with readers?”
This combination, he believes, is the winning combination that’s going to be “the best newsletter possible.”
DeFrancesco—and impressively, almost every editor I spoke with—instilled in me that EVERY story is evaluated through BI’s three pillars:
Business
Tech
Innovation
Even politics is filtered through “kitchen table economics.” And that’s why the BI brand voice is so strong and recognizable—something critical in today’s landscape of distrust in publications, but trust in the voices at the publications telling them.
Jamie Heller’s North Star: “Inside Business”
Since stepping into the top role, Jamie Heller has rebuilt BI around three principles:
One newsroom (no silos)
Distinctive reporting (less aggregation, more original work)
High standards (accuracy, fairness, rigor)
And a tighter editorial focus:
Innovators
Creator economy
Workplace
Career navigation
Real-world economic impact
“We’re not just delivering news, we’re building a full conversation across platforms,” Heller told me.
She’s delivering in the literal sense, as well. “Every day, we’re trying to deliver on our name, Business Insider, which is being inside business. We want to have scoops. We want to have inside insights. We want to bring people absolutely everything they need to know for them to succeed, get ahead, and get smart on business.”
And she’s not gun-shy in her approach. Her appetite for new ideas has yet to be satiated as her team churns out a consistent cadence of new product innovations—a sea of new newsletters, on-the-pulse news alerts, and multimedia clips across content—earning them a slew of industry awards and reader recognition.
Yet through her ambitious vision, she reinforces Business Insider’s commitment to fair, open-minded, reporter-driven reporting and standards, and she has hired editors like Tracy Connor to ensure that they’re upheld.
Format-Agnostic Journalism Is the Future
At BI, stories don’t belong to one format.
They move seamlessly from video to text, from text to short-form video, and from core reporting into newsletters and live events to maximize reach and impact.
“Wherever the reporting comes from, we want it everywhere,” said Heller.
This is what modern newsroom infrastructure looks like: not print-first or video-first, but just story-first.
The Product Layer: Making Journalism Work Harder
Julie Zeveloff, director of editorial product strategy, is focused on two things:
Showcasing journalism better
Making reporters’ lives easier
Recent innovations include:
Serialized storytelling (turning topics into multi-story arcs)
Topical newsletters (deep vertical expertise)
AI-powered SEO assistant (reducing manual work)
By working closely with product and tech teams, Zeveloff is ensuring that the newsroom is streamlining processes and reducing busywork, while leaning into serialized storytelling.
“Data informs, but human expertise guides,” Zeveloff told me. She shared that packaging deeper reporting into cohesive series is also driving stronger engagement.
And she credited BI’s refined focus and how that’s helped catapult the brand: “In the past few years, this return to focus on business and being experts in a specific area and a publication for a specific group of people, rather than trying to be attractive to everyone, has really helped us to narrow down what we care about and who we want to reach.”
BI Live: Turning Journalism Into Experience
Under Kim Last, editorial director of BI Live, the newsroom now extends into the real world.
Think:
Flagship events in San Francisco and New York
Davos, Cannes, global activations
Intimate, salon-style gatherings
Live interviews that break news on stage
“We want newsmakers making news, with our journalists, in real time,” Last told me.
The strategy: It’s not events as marketing. It’s events as journalism.
The events are designed to build a repeatable, community-driven experience anchored in its journalism. The strategy centers on putting newsmakers on stage to break news live, elevating newsroom talent, and extending coverage into global events and high-level roundtables focused on the future of work.
Video: BI’s Secret Weapon
Walking around the newsroom, I peeked into BI’s green screen studio, as well as its “staged” studio for live takes with DeFrancesco. It hit me. Business Insider isn’t just a newsroom: It’s a production company.
Barbara Corbellini Duarte, head of video, has built one of the most dominant operations in media:
37 million+ subscribers across all of BI’s YouTube channels
Emmy Award-winning documentaries
Hit franchises like Big Business and Still Standing
Their edge? “We analyze what works, but we also innovate constantly,” Duarte told me.
And maybe the most important strategy, Duarte told me: “We distill complex ideas into something easy, and fun, to understand.”
Duarte’s approach has led BI to win Emmys, Anthem Awards, Webbys, the George Polk award, and more.
Today’s Winning Newsroom Formula
The modern newsroom model is shifting fast. The rise of AI, the speed of social content, and the encroachment of content creators and independent media are changing the game. But Business Insider is in the race, and in many regards, winning at several turns.
BI’s ability and agility to act fast with accuracy, put the reader front and center, innovate across formats built on audience demand, and lean into the creator-driven era has made it one of the most formidable newsrooms in media today. As Heller told me, “Journalism has been and remains a team sport.”
And through it all, BI has positioned itself for a championship run, making it the team—or should I say newsroom—to beat.
Check out Meredith & The Media’s Newsroom Tour of Business Insider.
Videographer: Manaal Shareh (Website, Instagram, LinkedIn)
Editing: David Cohen (LinkedIn)
Special thank you to Ari Isaacman D’Angelo.