Tess Martinelli
Tess Martinelli covers business for Business Insider through the experiences of individual workers living through economic upheaval. Her work connects corporate events to the day‑to‑day reality of the people they displace, keeping the focus on how job losses, industry shifts, and uncertainty feel from the ground. She writes in clear, direct language that foregrounds a subject’s own voice and the choices they face after a sudden change at work.
Worker stories in times of corporate upheaval
Martinelli’s business coverage is driven by worker narratives rather than balance sheets. In her piece on a former flight attendant who lost her job when Spirit shut down, she builds the story around a single employee’s experience of an abrupt end to a flying career. The story follows what that shutdown means in human terms: a lost job, a disrupted routine, and a forced rethinking of what work can look like next. By anchoring a major airline’s closure in one person’s story, she turns an abstract business development into something concrete and relatable.
Emotional and practical fallout of job loss
Her reporting treats job loss as both an economic and emotional event. In the Spirit flight attendant story, she highlights how the subject manages their emotions after being laid off, not just how they update a résumé or apply for openings. The narrative explores hope, anxiety, and identity alongside financial concerns, showing how layoffs reshape a person’s sense of self as well as their budget. That emphasis on inner life gives her business reporting a tone closer to a reported memoir than a transactional career guide.
Narrative business features built around personal turning points
Martinelli favors a feature style that moves through a subject’s life at a turning point, rather than breaking news briefs. The Spirit shutdown story unfolds as a before‑and‑after: the routines and appeal of flight attendant work, the moment everything changes, and the effort to chart a new path in an uncertain job market. She uses first‑person framing to keep the subject’s perspective central, allowing them to explain what they miss, what they regret, and what they hope to build next. The result is business journalism that treats layoffs and industry volatility as pivotal chapters in a person’s working life, not just numbers in a labor report.
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.