Introducing the new retail reporter

Sep. 16—The guest on the Business Outlook podcast this week wasn't much of a guest at all.

We interviewed Allison Carpenter, who is one of the newest reporters at the Journal and works on the business desk.

She is working the retail and small business beat. She'll be hosting the show soon, with the aim to bring in and highlight local small businesses in a regular conversation.

We talked about Carpenter's first front-page story for the Journal, which was what we call in the business "a talker."

She wrote about ghost kitchens. Those are essentially when established restaurants pose as a different brand on delivery service applications like DoorDash.

The goal of the podcast was to introduce you to Carpenter. If you have a unique small business or retail story, please give her a pitch. You can reach her at acarpenter@abqjournal.com.

Here's a snippet of our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Business Outlook podcasts are released Monday afternoons and are available on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and SoundCloud.

Can you tell us a little about yourself?

"I'm mostly from New Mexico. I've lived here the majority of my life, and I started my journalism career down at the Roswell Daily Record. Print journalism was really important to me, and so I'm excited to be here at the Albuquerque Journal, reporting on local news and like keeping it in print."

Do you have experience working in restaurants or retail?

"I was a barista for all of my college career. I worked mostly at small shops, but a little bit at Starbucks, and then I was like a waitress for three months, but that was too hard."

When I talk to my family who doesn't work in the news business they ask how I get story ideas. I tell them I either come up with my own idea or my editor assigns them to me. You came in on day one with an interesting story idea about ghost kitchens. Can you tell us about those?

"So a ghost kitchen is when a restaurant poses as another brand or identity on like ordering apps like Uber Eats or on DoorDash. So the idea is that it is one kitchen making all of the food, but they are populating apps with a lot of opportunities for you to click on them. It can be a little deceitful because you don't necessarily know where your food's actually coming from."

It was a good story idea. You should keep coming up with your own story ideas, and then you won't have to be assigned any from me.

"The most reliable way to reach me is at acarpenter@abqjournal.com."