We Mean Business

We Mean Business is an interview program about business, money and accountability, and its most distinctive habit is treating the work of reporting as the subject. It is sponsored by the Reynolds Center at Arizona State University. Some conversations center on journalists honored with the Barlett and Steele Award, and those stay close to method. Alexa York, who won the 2025 award for Outstanding Young Journalist, talks with Quynh Le in a conversation presented as How They Did It. Officials had said an old weapons site in Luckey, Ohio, was fine. York ran her own tests for the Blade and found radiation in the groundwater far above federal limits, and state, local and federal agencies then opened investigations of their own. The texture is in what she could not use. She is candid that she could not publish what people around town told her without documents to back it up. She has also never found a record for a story a former bar owner heard from plant workers, that the site made ceramic tiles for the space shuttle. A special edition on the San Francisco Chronicle investigation 'Burned' comes at method from another side. That reporting, by Megan Van Muntz, Susie Nielsen and Bronte Whitpen, found that a flawed estimator tool called 360 Value left homeowners badly underinsured. Whitpen, a photojournalist who also writes and makes documentary video, went back to wildfire-hit communities several times to shoot photos and video and talk directly with families dealing with the fallout. Other episodes, including a Marketing Edition, turn to academic researchers. Dr. Daniel Motion, an associate professor of marketing at Tulane University, explains the loop behind rage bait, Oxford Dictionary's 2025 word of the year: anger drives engagement, platforms read engagement as interest, and people get served more of what provokes them. The conversation also raises guardrails for content that is legal but harmful. Dr. Evan Weingarten of the USC Marshall School of Business studies how experiences and memories shape decisions, which suits a moment when social media users are calling 2026 the new 2016 and brands keep reviving familiar characters and old music. Dr. Ben Klopak, an assistant professor of economics at Texas A&M University, draws on card transactions from millions of U.S. consumers to examine how auto-renewal, inattention and switching costs keep people paying, and what the FTC's click-to-cancel rule could mean. An episode on ethical collapse moves from HealthSouth's accounting fraud through the Wells Fargo fake account scandal, the Boeing 737 MAX crashes, FTX and Tricolor. A guest there argues that executives understand charitable giving buys goodwill, and that it can make a leader the 'golden boy' nobody examines. Another point is quieter: collapse is avoided by taking small problems seriously instead of calling them no big deal. Across all of it the questions are plain and patient, and long answers get room before the next question narrows the thread.