Sky News' Mark Kleinman Profiled in the Guardian

The Guardian's Chris Tryhorn has profiled Sky News' latest business appointment, City Editor, Mark Kleinman.  In the piece, Tryhorn looks at Kleinman's past, his age, how he lands his exclusives, and the burning question in media circles, how much money he's on.  Kleinman is rumoured to be earning around £200k per year at Sky News, a staggering amount for a 32 year old who has been in the business for less than six years. 

On the subject of Kleinman being employed by Sky as a challenge to the British business news monopoly held by the BBC's Robert Peston, Tryhorn writes;

Sky's swoop for Kleinman was widely seen as an attempt to mount a challenge to Peston, another former business editor of the Sunday Telegraph, who became a household name as business coverage shot up the news agenda. For many television viewers, Peston became the media face of the banking crisis after an agenda-setting scoop in September 2007 that Northern Rock needed emergency funding, which was followed by the collapse of Lehman Brothers and the ensuing financial crisis.

Kleinman is keen to play down any sense of rivalry and the tag of "Sky's answer to Robert Peston". "Robert is one of the foremost journalists in the country, let alone business journalists, so it's an incredibly flattering thing to be called," he says. "Robert, the BBC and Sky News have different audiences, Robert and I have different contacts, and we are interested in different things."

He adds: "It's very flattering that Sky News came to me to lead the news agenda in that sense, but in terms of the direct comparison with Robert I think those things are slightly meaningless."

On the subject of how Kleinman lands his scoops, Tryhorn writes;

So what is the secret of landing a scoop? "It's all about your contacts, it's all about being trusted and it's all about demonstrating that you have an understanding of the stories you're trying to cover," Kleinman says. "And it's also frankly about hard work."

One industry story had Kleinman sweet-talking a secretary at an advertising agency into telling him the name of everyone working on a particularly newsworthy account. He phoned each one. "Essentially what it boils down to is you are out there early in the morning and late at night and building relationships with people. There's no bigger secret to it than that." It is essential he keeps those contacts up in his new post, he says. "I'm spending a lot of my time with my contacts, either in person or on the phone. I should say so far Sky News have been absolutely fantastic about letting me have that freedom to get out there, because they realise I'm not going to break stories if I'm literally on air all the time or tied to my desk or in a position where I just can't speak to my contacts."

Read the full Guardian article here.