The Covenants for Journalists course gives credit journalists a clear, practical grounding in leveraged finance covenants, starting from first principles and assuming no legal or documentation background. The course explains what covenants are, why they exist, and what the parties on each side of a transaction are trying to achieve - and what each of those things means for the person covering the deal.
Participants work through the full architecture of a covenant package: capital structure and credit support, the debt and liens covenants and the calculation mechanics behind them, restricted payments and asset sales, economic terms, sweetheart deals and changes of ownership, ESG and sustainability-linked terms, and the reports, defaults, amendments and waivers that govern the relationship over the life of a deal. The distinction between maintenance and incurrence covenants is addressed throughout, along with the different types of baskets and how each creates flexibility for the borrower.
Every section pairs the concepts with the job. Video lessons teach the mechanics, and each section closes with a Newsroom exercise: a colleague's draft on screen with the operative covenant language beside it, where participants mark what the documents don't support, choose the quotation that runs, decide what can be printed unattributed, and pick the question that gets a usable answer from a source. The exercises follow one deal through the whole course, so what's learned in each section compounds in the next, and a final exam covers the full course.
By the end, participants will be able to read a covenant package with confidence, identify the restricted group, understand what a borrower can and cannot do, and recognize where flexibility has been built in - then turn that reading into coverage: claims checked against the documents, quotes that survive scrutiny, and sharper questions for the people on the other end of the phone. They'll have the vocabulary to engage lawyers, bankers and investors on equal terms, and a framework that builds with every document they see.
