When a group of new students arrives at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, we assign them to a neighborhood and send them out to walk the streets. Find out what matters to the residents and come back with stories on their concerns, we tell them. It's a good way to learn the basics of reporting.

Those who choose to concentrate on business writing are told something very different when we begin work the following January. "Were the stories you came back with in the first semester true?" I ask them. They cautiously shake their heads no. "You bet they weren't," I say.

We teach them that business journalism—and in our view, all good journalism—begins by discovering what the story really is and finding the facts (which in business and economics is usually a key number), then talking to regular people about how the trend or development affects them.

Unfortunately, one of the major reasons for the debacle over Amazon's plan to bring 25,000 jobs to New York is that local media (Crain's and a few others excepted) acted as if they were still first- semester students in CUNY's J-School. The one hopeful sign is that when Amazon walked away from its plan, startled reporters and editors figured out they had been telling the wrong story.

Let's hope they remember next time.

Almost from the moment in November when Amazon decided to put its second headquarters in Queens, opponents grabbed the spotlight. The political reporters are obsessed with the impact of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and once she seized on the issue with other progressive groups, their opposition and whether they could defeat the establishment became the story.

But less than a month later, the respected Quinnipiac poll found that voters in Queens and the rest of the city supported the Amazon deal by a wide margin. The media narrative was simply wrong, but the reporters (too few of whom were business reporters) clung to their story line. The most egregious example came at the second City Council hearing on the deal, when the reporters ignored a pro-Amazon rally outside City Hall to focus on the opponents inside.

Days after a Siena poll confirmed the Quinnipiac finding, Amazon announced it would no longer pursue a Long Island City location because of the opposition. Suddenly reporters began asking whether the decision would be bad for New York. "Do you know of any example where a city turned its back on 25,000 jobs?" one television reporter asked me.

The media discovered that Long Island City wasn't exactly the booming area it had assumed. Local television stations in particular discovered the many local businesses that supported the plan and said the neighborhood needed it. Suddenly I and others at Crain's were in demand to give that side of the story on TV and radio. (The New York Times was an exception: It kept its focus on the political opponents.)

I am glad the lesson has been learned. It certainly was an expensive one.