For Nathaniel Meyersohn, joining the CNN Business team back in 2017 was a surprising — yet exciting — prospect that would completely change his career.
At the time, Meyersohn was two years out of college, having earned a degree in American history. He got his start in journalism with an internship with Buzzfeed News before he joined CNN on the investigations team.
“Eventually, leadership moved me to CNN Business,” Meyersohn said. “I got incredibly lucky. The team is so good at developing young reporters. My boss, (CNN Business Executive Editor) Dave Goldman, is the ultimate mentor.”
Now, readers can’t seem to get enough of Meyersohn’s consumer-facing business stories, which focus on topics such as the real cost of the $5 Costco chicken and why CVS Pharmacy’s receipts are so long.
We recently chatted with Meyersohn about his experience as a journalist at CNN Business. Below are excerpts from our conversation.
Your stories have a reputation for being popular with readers. How do you come up with story ideas?
There are a few ways that ideas come to me. One is as a consumer myself, when I go to the store, I’m trying to figure out: “What's a little weird in this store? What brand is doing something kind of quirky or different?” Sometimes the ideas are right in front of you. I live in New York City. There are no Walmarts or Dollar Generals here. So I try to go as far out of the city to write these stories as I possibly can. New York is not representative of how the rest of the country shops.
I’m always asking questions about what things mean for consumers and also get great ideas from colleagues. There are a lot of really smart people at CNN, really curious people.
Examples of some hits we've had are why Heinz ketchup says it has 57 varieties, why Chick-fil-A workers always say “my pleasure” and why all of Costco’s products are called Kirkland Signature.
How has your background in history helped inform your work as a journalist?
Studying history, researching, digging, analyzing — they're all skills that translate very well into journalism. So even though I didn't write for my high school paper or my college paper, being a history major taught me how to be curious, ask questions, find sources and discover stories that had been lost to history. I used the experience that I gained under my professors and kind of translated that over to business reporting.
You rattled off some of your hit stories, but what are some of your personal favorites that you’ve worked on?
We are doing a series called “Curious Consumer” where we answer questions people have always had about brands and products and look for surprising angles.
I did a story recently about the history of gas station bathrooms. They used to be really clean, and in the 1930s they would advertise how clean they were to try to get women to come in them. They were really focused on making gas station bathrooms destinations for women. To me that was super surprising. We think of gas station bathrooms as being disgusting. But there used to be a time when they were thought of much differently. I loved looking at the old advertising and reading odd books that nobody had picked up in forever about the history of gas station bathrooms and the history of gas stations.
I love trying to find the really, really quirky stuff. I just love stories where I can learn about history that I didn't know and relay it to the readers.
