Hannah Levintova
“Talking about real people and real impact is the way to bring business stories alive.”
Hannah Levintova is the special projects editor at Mother Jones. She reports on business, corporate accountability, debt, and financial inequality, and leads the newsroom in investigations on these topics. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School, where she was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business Journalism. Previously, she was a reporter in Mother Jones’ Washington, DC bureau covering politics, and before that worked on the news desk at NPR, at the Washington Monthly, and for a stint as a Freedom of Information Act officer at a federal agency.
You've become an expert in translating the financial mechanics behind major social issues. What's your trick when making these massive, often abstract numbers relatable to readers?
The first thing I do is look for a narrative vehicle to tell the story. I believe that for a story to explain the impact of a business action or decision, it needs to include a person or an institution that has experienced that impact. My goal is to learn about them and their story. That character can then drive the story forward and make these wonky theoretical things real.
If I tell you how private equity firms work, that's nice, but it feels like a policy paper and you’ll probably stop paying attention pretty quickly. But suppose I introduce you to tenants in a building bought by a mysterious private equity firm that is now trying to kick them out, and tell you about how this new landlord is impacting their lives. That story is a lot more visceral and digestible for readers.
Talking about real people and real impact is the way to bring business stories alive. Most people have a general sense of how financial forces, businesses, and Wall Street actors are making moves that affect their lives, but they don't necessarily have a clear understanding of how that works. I'm always trying to bridge that gap.
Andrew Rae illustration for Hannah Levintova’s article Newport Was Used to Billionaires. Then Stephen Schwarzman Came to Town.
How much do you think about word choice as you're writing?
So much. Thesaurus.com is probably my most frequented website. Because I am always trying to convey complicated concepts in simple words.
That is key to good journalism. Simple word choice is what will grasp an audience and keep them reading. In business reporting in particular, it is so easy to get bogged down in finance-speak. The industry is full of it. I remember in business school, I learned that the term “issuing bonds” just means borrowing money. And I kept thinking, why don't we just say that? It's so much simpler.
What's the first thing you do when working on a story?
I make a spreadsheet. I love spreadsheets. Each one I make has a lot of different tabs—for people I want to reach out to, the role they play, contact info, and percolating ideas. As I report, I also make a detailed timeline—a chronological listing of all the events related to the story. For writing and reporting, knowing what order things happened is incredibly important.
“Some of the best writing advice I've received is that you are allowed to have a point or a stance.”
How has your voice changed over the years as a reporter?
The more I've done this reporting and writing, the more confident I have become in definitively framing stories. Some of the best writing advice I've received is that you are allowed to have a point or a stance. The documents I’ve gathered or the interviews I’ve done establish certain facts or patterns, and it is ok to state them plainly. You don't have to equivocate in every sentence, or hedge.
Business school was transformative for my reporting because I wanted to cover the corporate world, but I had no background in it. Getting an MBA didn’t make me an expert in all things business, but it taught me where to look, what questions to ask, and what types of people I should try to call to get further clarity.
Business narratives in journalism, like any narratives, can follow a pack mentality when reporting on Silicon Valley, AI, startups, etc. How do you break from the pack?
The key for any journalist to do original reporting is time. And that is almost always the resource that is hardest to come by. Journalism has always been hard to monetize, and it has only gotten harder. That has closed a lot of newsrooms, especially at the local level, and shrunk many more through layoffs. The result is fewer journalists trying to cover ever more beats. In other words—not enough time.
Suppose you're at a place that depends primarily on ad revenue. In that case, you're trying to crank out more stories to get more eyeballs and clicks, which means you don't always have the time to have more conversations, do more reporting, or get a really holistic view of a question to understand it in a way that might go against pack mentality.
Because I work at a place that prioritizes longer-form projects, I am often given that time to do more interviews and to really look at the question. That translates across the organization. It means my editors ask probing questions—we operate on a timeline where usually you have space to try your best to get the story right. It's a tremendous gift.
You've reported on very powerful organizations. Have you ever had moments as an investigative journalist where you felt unsafe?
I have never felt physically unsafe. I would say that even in interactions that have felt charged or where we disagree, no one I've ever written about ever made me feel that way. That's a privilege that American journalists have that isn’t shared by many of our colleagues in countries that are more repressive.
When I approach a powerful institution for comment, I try to have a lot of reporting in hand. I'm ready to ask specific questions. And my goal is not to do a gotcha story and to get them to say something incendiary. That is a big misconception, in my opinion, of what reporters are trying to do. My goal is truly, "I want to check this with you. And if it's wrong, tell me what specifically is wrong, and give me the documentation to show that."
Are there other journalists you follow?
I follow so many, but I’ll give you a few of my favorite long-form writers and investigative reporters. Rachel Aviv at The New Yorker is excellent and prolific. She just had a piece on Alice Munro that blew me away, and one a few months ago on Lucy Letby, the neonatal nurse who, as Aviv expertly reports out, may have been wrongfully convicted of murder. Another New Yorker writer who does a lot of great business and technology stories is Sheelah Kolhatkar.
I think ProPublica is doing some of the best investigative reporting in America right now. My old colleague Andy Kroll is doing incredible work there on political influence. Their financial reporting has impressed me for years—from the Secret IRS Files, where they got a leak of tax info for some of America’s wealthiest people, to Justin Elliott’s series on Turbotax. Lizzie Presser’s health coverage there is also exceptional.
For something lighter, I enjoy reading celebrity profiles by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I continue to be amazed that she’s both an accomplished journalist and somehow also a phenomenal novelist. It is rare to be so good at both fiction and nonfiction.
What's something you'd like to write about that you haven't written about?
I think there is a lot of reporting to do at the nexus of finance and climate. I’m also personally fascinated with what is colloquially referred to as the Great Wealth Transfer: The boomer generation is about to pass on a historic amount of wealth to their millennial children.
What does that sort of unprecedented generational wealth transfer mean for inequality? What happens when a whole swathe of society receives transformational sums of money while others don't? I’m curious about the social shifts that might come from this financial change.
You're fluent in Russian. What's your favorite Russian word or phrase?
There is one that my mom has said to me my whole life: "The morning is wiser than the evening.” In Russian, it is: "utro vechera mudreneye." In life or in writing, sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to sleep on it.