By Emma Carew

“Oh, you’re interested in business reporting?”

This was the phrase I heard constantly from recruiters at the 2008 UNITY Convention in Chicago.

If I answered yes (I was a business news intern at the time, and it seemed to be going well, so I figured why not?), it generally bought me an extra five to 10 minutes with the recruiter. It got me a pretty lengthy conversation with the then-AME for financial news at The Washington Post booth, which led to a follow-up e-mail that evening.

But after a summer covering financial news for the Post, I’m fairly certain that business and financials is not the path for me.

As I set off for Washington, people said, “Oh, financial, great time for that right now, lots of stories.” We were (and still may be) in the midst of the worst economic meltdown in modern history.

At a smaller paper, their assessment might have been true. It probably would have been a great time to be the intern on a local financial desk: lots of stories, fewer reporters.

But in a newsroom that has yet to feel the financial squeeze in the way that most smaller papers have, and which has a staff full of Knight-Bagehot fellows, there is less reliance on interns to fill the holes.

No doubt about it, writing for The Washington Post and its financial section was hard. There were days I got thrown on a story about defense contracting or was asked to find out if a small company had delisted its stock so it wouldn’t have to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

Sometimes I had no idea what I was doing with some of the stories. And in the midst of a major newsroom reorganization, there weren’t always a lot of people I could turn to for guidance.

But I had small victories. After frantically trying to learn what “blue-chip stocks” meant, how to follow the Dow, the S&P and the Nasdaq, and what to ask analysts about “how the market moved,” I felt proud that I was able to get some form of readable copy on the Post’s Web site.

I was also proud to see an idea I pitched during the first week of my internship executed and my story about telecommuting employees prominently displayed on the business page of the paper.

I knew I had learned something and grown as a reporter when national newspapers picked up the story.

In the end, my assignments taught me what it meant to be a WaPo financial reporter, and why it was different from being a financial or business reporter in other newsrooms.

No, SEC filings weren’t fun to dig through, but they made my stories richer. They proved things that otherwise were only anecdotal. They disproved things I had been told by PR people.

My portfolio this summer may not be as bountiful as those of my fellow interns at the Post or my Chips Quinn colleagues, but I am proud of what I was able to do. Despite the frustrations, I know I am a stronger, more skeptical reporter.

I probably could succeed as a local business reporter at a smaller daily.

But more important, I learned that the skills of being a business reporter — relying on documents, reading balance sheets, digging through data and reports — will strengthen my work, whether I’m covering schools, a city council, cops or courts.

Emma Carew is an intern for the Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington, D.C. She was a Summer 2009 Chips Quinn Scholar for The Washington Post. A graduate of the University of Minnesota, Carew worked as a reporter, senior reporter and editorial writer at the campus paper, The Minnesota Daily, from 2005-2009, covering various beats. She has covered business, education and local news as an intern for the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Saint Paul Pioneer Press and Minnesota Monthly magazine. She has been an editorial assistant at The Associated Press in Minneapolis and is an active member of the Asian American Journalists Association, working for the student projects in Miami and piloting the Minnesota chapter Spotlight Awards for college journalism.