Kerry Breen
Kerry Breen connects business news to everyday life through detailed coverage of consumer risks and practical guidance. She reports for CBS News on business and consumer stories where product safety, corporate decisions and public health concerns intersect.
Consumer recalls and product safety
Breen’s most visible work focuses on recalls that affect what people buy and use, especially food and household products. In coverage of an ice cream product sold in 17 states that was recalled over potential metal fragments, she foregrounds the specific hazard, who is affected and what steps consumers need to take. Her recall pieces are highly service-oriented: they spell out brand names, lot codes, distribution areas and refund or replacement options so that readers can quickly determine whether they are at risk and how to respond.
Within this niche, she treats recalls less as isolated incidents and more as part of a broader consumer-safety landscape. She reinforces regulatory details such as which agency is involved, the formal reason for the recall and any reported injuries, grounding each story in the underlying business and compliance context. The result is coverage that can serve both as a quick alert for the public and as a record of how companies handle quality and safety failures.
Health-related business impacts
Although her beat is business, Breen often works at the point where corporate decisions and health considerations meet. Stories like the ice cream recall highlight not only the defect itself but also the implications for food manufacturers, retailers and supply chains. She tracks how companies communicate about problems, what corrective actions they take and how regulators weigh in, giving her coverage relevance for both consumers and business stakeholders.
Her framing tends to emphasize consequences: financial exposure for a company, reputational risk, and the potential costs of medical treatment or product replacement for affected customers. By laying out these business impacts in plain language, she makes it easier to see how a seemingly narrow safety issue fits into larger questions about corporate responsibility and risk management.
Service journalism and clear guidance
Breen’s reporting style is practical and direct. She writes in straightforward language, keeps paragraphs tight and structures stories so that key facts — what happened, what the risk is, what to do — appear high in the piece. Her work often reads as a checklist in narrative form, giving readers enough detail to act without forcing them to wade through unnecessary background.
She favors verifiable information from official notices, company statements and regulatory documents, and she brings those details into her stories without jargon. That approach makes her coverage useful in moments when readers need clear, accurate instructions — for example, when deciding whether to discard a product, contact a manufacturer or watch for specific symptoms after a safety alert.
Focus within the business beat
Within the broader business remit at CBS News, Breen occupies a distinct consumer-facing lane. She gravitates to stories where the business story is inseparable from its impact on ordinary people, whether that impact comes via the grocery aisle, the home freezer or other everyday transactions. Her work makes the business desk a destination not only for markets and corporate earnings, but also for concrete information about how business decisions show up in households and kitchens.
Because she consistently highlights the real-world implications of recalls and safety issues, her coverage is valuable for anyone watching how brands manage risk and communicate under pressure. She gives attention to both the immediate hazard and the longer-term trust dynamic between companies and their customers, making that intersection of business, safety and public confidence the core of her beat.
4 more business journalists.
Alex Bronzini-Vender
Alex Bronzini-Vender is a business reporter who focuses on how economic forces and corporate decisions shape specific communities and industries. He covers business for the Washington Monthly, writing reported pieces at the intersection of commerce and public life. His work reflects the magazine’s emphasis on linking markets and money to power, policy, and everyday experience. He treats business not as balance sheets and deals but as choices that affect local realities. In “Fear and Loathing in Palo Alto,” he uses a city tied to the tech sector to examine how a powerful industry influences a community. He grounds his business beat in on-the-ground consequences rather than treating corporate and financial developments in isolation.
Alex Smith
Alex Smith focuses on the business impact of enterprise technology, with a distinctive emphasis on AI literacy and skills rather than technical specifications. They write for Technology Record, covering how artificial intelligence and cloud platforms from major providers are turned into concrete programmes for organisations and governments. Their beat sits at the junction of business strategy, national digital policy and large-scale technology partnerships. They report on national AI literacy programmes and public–private partnerships, showing how policy choices, vendor capabilities and skills gaps intersect. On the business beat, they treat AI and cloud as tools for competitiveness, workforce readiness and participation in a data-driven economy. Their concise, announcement-led reporting highlights who is partnering with whom, what programme is being launched, which technologies underpin it and how it changes capability on the ground for executive readers.
Alison Durkee
Alison Durkee focuses on how law, regulation and politics create business risks for major companies and industries. She is a reporter at Forbes, where she writes news-driven explainers on complex legal and regulatory developments and their impact on corporate strategy, reputation and markets. Her coverage centers on companies under scrutiny, especially in technology and other high-growth sectors, and tracks trials, investigations and fast-changing policy fights. She breaks down lawsuits, inquiries and regulatory moves into clear parts, grounded in timelines, filings and official actions. She reports on generative artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies as tests of legal frameworks and corporate risk management, explaining how issues like intellectual property, safety compliance, consumer protection and governance can reshape product roadmaps, partnerships and investor expectations.
Alyson Shontell
Alyson Shontell covers business through the lens of leadership, using in-depth conversations with powerful executives and founders to show how their decisions shape companies, markets, and public life. She is editor in chief at Fortune, overseeing coverage across the masthead while continuing to write selected high-impact pieces. Her core work is long, reported interviews and profiles of CEOs of large companies, dominant tech firms, and fast-growing startups. She focuses on how leaders think, manage risk, make unconventional calls, and handle crises, culture, and the future of work. Her subjects include corporate chiefs, startup founders, and political figures treated as executives. She probes operating detail, governance, internal culture, and trade-offs around growth, disruption, and workplace models, using concrete examples and direct, accessible prose that foregrounds the subject’s voice while pressing for specifics.