Scott Gurvey

A few months ago I moderated a training teleconference for reporters as part of the continuing education program of SABEW, the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. The teleconference focused on Initial public offerings—the first sales of stock issued by a company to the public.

The teleconference is now available as a podcast you can play at any time to hear a panel of experts decipher the language of IPOs and discuss how reporters should cover companies as they prepare to go public. We talked about how reporters can use the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR database to access IPO prospectuses and which nuggets of information and red flags they should look for in SEC documents when researching companies that are about to go public.

On the panel was John Divine, an investing reporter at U.S. News & World Report, Lauren Hirsch the deals team leaders and correspondent at Thomson Reuters in New York, Tom Taulli who has been involved in the IPO market since the mid-1990s when he co-founded Web IPO, and Jack Willoughby, a senior editor at Barron’s who wrote the financial publication’s “Offerings in the Offings” column.

You can hear the podcast here.