Virtually every story can be boiled down to one thing: money. Who has it? Who doesn’t? Who’s successfully lobbying for it? Who’s disenfranchised and deserves more of it? Economics is at the heart of most stories worth reporting, and yet it is the one subject journalists, collectively, are rarely expected to understand with any depth.

In journalism school, professors admonish us to “follow the money,” but that adage seems tailored only for obvious stories about campaign funding or sweetheart zoning deals. In my time as a reporter for The Houston Chronicle, my paper’s pages have been filled with features on topics that, at first blush, don’t necessarily appear to be economic in nature. Hurricane Katrina evacuees and skyrocketing crime. The rise of the Minute Men and border patrol issues. The war in Iraq and how national security is tied to oil. As a profession, we’re great at politics and culture wars so we approach a lot of news from those angles. It’s an easier approach, but it ignores the fact that politics and culture are inextricably linked with economics. When I look at newspapers with a critical eye, I am often left wondering, “Where’s the money?” Even the most masterly narratives can fall flat when economic issues are conspicuously absent or, worse, given superficial treatment.

I saw just how much more comprehensive coverage can be when metro reporters and business writers collaborated two years ago after an explosion ripped through BP’s Texas City refinery, the nation’s third largest, killing fifteen people and injuring 170.

In the moments after the blast, editors treated the story as a standard industrial catastrophe. Reporters rushed to the scene and to local hospitals to gather information on the blaze, the casualties, and the possibility a toxic cloud would descend onto the community. It didn’t...

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