Louis Rukeyser

By Thompson Wall

Television journalists whom viewers feel they can trust without reservation are as rare as they come.

But Louis Rukeyser, the best-selling author, columnist, lecturer and television host, was the first and one of the few television journalists whose economic expertise and charming personality attracted one of the most loyal followings in financial television history.

Louis Richard Rukeyser was born Jan. 30, 1933, in New York City and grew up in the nearby suburb of New Rochelle. Born into a family of financial journalists, Rukeyser developed an unusually thorough understanding of economics at an early age.

Rukeyser’s father, Merryle Stanley Rukeyser, was a nationally syndicated economics columnist who wrote for the New York Tribune and the New York Evening Journal as one of the first true financial journalists. Rukeyser’s brother, William, was managing editor of Fortune and his two other brothers, Robert and Merryle Jr., were corporate communicators with IBM and Newsweek, respectively.

Rukeyser graduated from Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1954, choosing to specialize in public aspects of business. He took a $55-a-week reporting job at the Baltimore Sun and became the London bureau chief within five years.

Rukeyser’s television career began when he joined ABC news in 1965 as a senior economics correspondent and commentator. He worked as both ABC’s Paris correspondent and chief of the London bureau.

In 1970, Rukeyser was chosen to host of Maryland Public Television and PBS’ newest venture, Wall $treet Week. The weekly half-hour special was the first financial journalism television program, carving the way for major business news networks such as CNBC and Fox Business Network.

The show transformed the public’s opinion of Wall Street, introducing the notion that not just the rich could become personal investors.

The show thrived under Rukeyser’s natural talent. Billed as an expert in show business and a master of panache, Rukeyser delivered pun-filled, easy to understand commentary on topics audiences previously viewed as dreadfully dull. Rukeyser insisted his guests use language that audiences could easily understand, often using the line, “Now say that again in English.”

In 1979, People magazine named the deep-voiced, silver-haired personality as the only sex symbol of “the dismal science of economics.” Those at PBS jokingly dubbed him “the Big Bird of prime-time” for his ability to rake in underwriter support and high public viewership.

Andrew Leckey, president of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, said Rukeyser treated his guests on Wall $treet Week just as he would treat his personal friends.

“When he brought guests on, he was amiable but also had a little edge to him,” said Leckey, who knew Rukeyser personally. “People thought he was a smart cookie who was watching out for their interests. Like having a really bright uncle who was seeing into things for you.”

Tom Hudson, former anchor and managing editor of “Nightly Business Report,” grew up watching Wall $treet Week with fond memories of Rukeyser’s glitzy holiday programs.

“I think Rukeyser as the showman was always realty on display on New Years Eve,” Hudson said. “Just Lou in a tuxedo and all the guests in gowns and everything else – it was very much a throwback to television’s heyday. It was a celebration of the year regardless of what the equity and capital markets may have done. And it just made for good, fun television.”

Wall $treet Week ran from 1970 to 2002, attracting an audience of 6 million regular viewers – the most of any public television series – at the show’s peak in the mid-1980s. The show earned more than $6 million a year and was carried by 300 PBS stations.

Rukeyser’s influence on the market became so strong that academics coined the term “The Rukeyser Effect” to denote the phenomenon that stocks mentioned on his Friday evening show would rise the following Monday.

Nearing the end of its 32 years on PBS, Wall $treet Week began to suffer a steady decline in viewership due to emerging competition from networks like CNBC and new financial shows such as “Nightly Business Report.”

In 2002, Rukeyser quit Wall $treet Week in a nasty dispute with Maryland Public Television and transferred to CNBC a month later with the debut of “Louis Rukeyser’s Wall Street,” though neither show lasted much longer.

Jon Friedman, a former MarketWatch media columnist, interviewed Rukeyser for Bloomberg in the 1990s.

“It wasn’t Rukeyser’s fault,” Friedman said. “It wasn’t CNBC’s fault. It was just he was so established on Friday nights on PBS, I think any kind of change would have been jarring to the viewers and once you establish yourself on television, it’s very hard to reestablish yourself,”

In 2003, Rukeyser left CNBC when he began undergoing treatment for multiple myeloma, a type of bone marrow cancer.

Rukeyser died in 2006 at the age of 73. He won the Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Business and Financial Reporting in 2004.

“His style, his wit, his compassion, he was just a model journalist,” Friedman said. “He’s the best. He’s still the best.”

Thompson Wall is a business journalism major at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Bill Wolman

By Jonathan LaMantia

Remembered by his colleagues as a messy but brilliant man, William “Bill” Wolman accomplished much during his 40-year career in business journalism, thriving as a BusinessWeek editor and CNBC commentator — two paths which at first seemed odd fits for a man who held a doctorate in economics.

Wolman made it work though, balancing the roles of economist, reporter and editor at BusinessWeek, and later, adding the role of commentator on CNBC.

Soma Golden Behr joined BusinessWeek’s staff two years after Wolman in 1962 when one of her professors told her it was the only place where a journalist could write about economics. She said she remembered Wolman as a wonderful character.

He would roll up his sleeves, even in the middle of winter, she said, and there would be cigarette ashes falling down his shirt.

“I remember when he cooked a goose at Christmas. It was such a big job and there was so little meat in the goose. It was very funny. He was quirky,” Golden Behr said. “He was just kind of the crazy professor-type in the middle of a very businessy place. But he was so smart and he had such insights on everything that he got away with it.”

Raised in Montreal, Canada, Wolman graduated from McGill University and earned his doctorate in economics from Stanford University.

In 1960, while working as an assistant professor of economics at Washington State University, Wolman took a $500 flight to New York to interview at Business Week.

He was hired by Leonard Silk, whom Wolman described to colleagues as a mentor, and later became the economics editor in 1965.

Golden Behr described Wolman, who died on Dec. 5, 2011 at the age of 83, as always interested in exploring economic ideas and relating them to people’s lives.

“He wasn’t interested in just abstract theory. It was about how it affected policy or the way the economy was or the way people lived,” she said. “He wrote in the English language. He didn’t just write numbers. He wasn’t going to be happy writing for economic journals. He was writing for laymen, and businessmen and policymakers.”

Though Silk left the magazine in 1969, Wolman remained for much of the next 30 years, until he retired as chief economist in 2001.

He left and returned to BusinessWeek twice during his career, holding positions at Citibank and Argus Research, an investment research company, while he was away from the magazine.

Steve Shepard, who served as editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek from 1984 to 2005, said Wolman liked to play in late-night poker games at retreats, which the BusinessWeek editorial staff held to discuss ways to improve the magazine, “For an intellectual, which he really was, he was also one of the guys — bawdy and loved to play poker and smoke cigarettes and stay up all night,” Shepard said.

Wolman won a National Magazine Award for his 1980 single-topic issue, the “Reindustrialization of America,” which explored whether the United States could regain its manufacturing prowess. The issue also received a Deadline Club award, a John Hancock Award and a University of Missouri Journalism Award.

Michael Mandel, who joined the BusinessWeek staff in 1989 and took over as chief economist at BusinessWeek when Wolman retired, said the issue exemplified Wolman’s support of big ideas.

“In retrospect, in some sense, it was too early,” Mandel said. “But it really sort of showed Bill’s ability to get a hold of important issues when they were very early because at that point, there was still debate about what was happening to manufacturing.”

Mandel said Wolman’s expertise in economics helped him use data to reveal the implications of economics stories.

“He knew where all the bodies were buried because he knew economics,” Mandel said. “He was able to cut through a lot of the fog and really get at what people cared about.”

A coworker of Wolman’s for 18 years, Gary Weiss said Wolman’s greatest contribution to the magazine was as a staunch advocate for writers in the finance and economics departments, which he supervised from 1986 to 2001.

“He wasn’t afraid to really push for his people, despite the institutional bias against tough articles at the magazine,” said Weiss, who dedicated his most recent book to Wolman and fellow BusinessWeek editor Seymour Zucker. “By tough articles I mean investigative articles that reflected negatively on people on Wall Street.”

Weiss recalled a meeting where Shepard wanted to downplay the negative aspects of an article he was writing on the American Stock Exchange Emerging Company Marketplace. After leaving the meeting, Wolman and editor Chris Welles told Weiss to disregard those instructions and proceed as intended. The article came out the way Weiss wanted it.

“Not every editor would do that, saying, ‘Just disregard everything the editor-in-chief says,’ Weiss said. “That was pretty rare.”

Wolman also co-authored four books: “The Beat-Inflation Strategy” in 1975; “The Decline of U.S. Power” in 1980; “The Judas Economy” in 1998; and “The Great 401(k) Hoax” in 2003. He co-authored the latter two works with his wife, Anne Colamosca.

His contributions to business journalism were not limited to print, though.

In the early 1980s, Wolman served as the executive editor of “Business Times,” a business news program on ESPN that predated CNBC.

He would later appear as a commentator on the CNBC programs “Market Wrap” and “Closing Bell,” in which he was positioned as the left-leaning economist opposite conservative commentators like Larry Kudlow.

Tyler Mathisen, who co-anchored “Market Wrap” and “Closing Bell,” said he thought Wolman, with his tousled white hair and slightly raspy voice, made a curious choice as a TV commentator.

“He was unapologetically un-TV,” Mathisen said. “If Brian Williams and Scott Pelley are in your minds-eye when you think of a TV journalist, Bill Wolman was about as far from that as you can get.”

But Mathisen remembered Wolman for his preparedness and ability to explain economic concepts in a logical way.

“He understood who his audience was, and he understood that though he understood the content, maybe the viewer didn’t,” Mathisen said. “The best communicators and the really masterful people can make it really simple and digestible for the everyman, and he was able to do that.”

During the time he juggled both BusinessWeek and CNBC, Wolman would leave the magazine’s offices to appear on CNBC, returning sometimes in the evening to edit stories.

“He’d disappear around 3:30, 4 o’clock,” said Jeff Laderman, who worked with Wolman at BusinessWeek for 15 years. “We had a TV going in the pantry, and you’d walk into the pantry and see him there.”

Though BusinessWeek changed after Wolman left, Shepard said the pioneer of economics reporting’s lasting impact on business journalism could be seen in the numerous journalists he hired and trained.

“There were a lot of people who came along, and he identified those people and hired them and trained them. He was really very good at that,” Shepard said. “He cared about hiring very smart people that would be in his mold.”

Jonathan LaMantia is a Class of 2014 business journalism major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from Oceanside, N.Y.

Ida Tarbell

By Robert Kochersberger

When Ida Minerva Tarbell, daughter of an oilfield tank maker and middle-named for the Roman goddess of wisdom, arrived in northwestern Pennsylvania in 1857, no one could have imagined the indelible role she would play in American journalism and the coverage of business — one in particular.

One of the crusading journalists labeled “muckrakers” by President Teddy Roosevelt, Tarbell was the lone woman among such illustrious reporters as Upton Sinclair, Lincoln Steffens, Peter Finley Dunne and others. She was different from other journalists and other women from an early age.

As the lone woman among the 40 “hostile and indifferent boys” in her class of 1880 at Allegheny College, in Meadville, Pa., she studied a wide range of topics and became interested in technology, peering into the world of the minuscule with a microscope and speaking on a rudimentary telephone.

Tarbell’s first foray into journalism was on the staff of The Chautauquan magazine, where she hoped only to earn “pin money” but grew in professional stature until she began to write articles for publication. She wanted to learn about magazine production, and under the watchful eye of the composing room foreman became obsessive about detail and having things right.

Tarbell spent three years in Paris, speaking French, studying French revolutionary women and supporting herself solely on the strength of her reporting and writing. During the Paris years Tarbell had experiences that remained with her for life: she truly became professional in the world of journalism, and she became sensitive to social issues in a way that was reflected in her later writing about such topics as factory safety and philanthropy. To see a former countess rummaging through the trash for something to eat was deeply meaningful for her.

Tarbell wrote on a wide range of topics from Paris for American newspapers, and her “syndicate” kept her afloat for three years of great adventures starting from her base in the Latin Quarter. But an encounter with Samuel C. McClure, editor of the eponymous magazine, who looked her up in Paris after reading her dispatches, brought her back to the United States.

At first Tarbell was the magazine’s principal biographer, and her writing on the lives of Abraham Lincoln and Napoleon Bonaparte boosted circulation and helped her become, as McClure later wrote, “the most generally famous woman in America.”

Tarbell was best known for the stunning series on the history of the Standard Oil Co, and its founder, John D. Rockefeller. She no doubt was driven in part by her childhood experiences of the oil industry, in which her father lost his business and income. But she also had first-hand knowledge of the oil regions in a wide sense, and as a college-educated woman had the intellectual firepower that such a monumental series — two years’ worth of articles — required.

The series brought infamy down on Rockefeller’s head, and “the Standard,” as it was called, soon was broken into pieces. Tarbell never said she felt pleasure at the demise of the company, but it is hard to imagine she did not.

She wrote in the autobiography that what she was doing “what we regarded as a legitimate piece of historical work. We were never apologists nor critics, only journalists intent on discovering what had gone into the making of the most perfect of all monopolies.”

Tarbell had two themes in her business and investigative reporting. The first was that business is important, can be profitable and is not inherently evil. The second was that business had certain obligations to its workers, with regard to their human needs that in many ways went unfulfilled. She believed that good treatment of workers would lead to increased productivity and profit.

Examples of Tarbell’s later business writing showed the breadth of her interest. She wrote of Pittsburgh as “a tariff-made city” and decried the millionaires who manipulated iron and steel tariffs to grow great wealth. Tarbell wrote approvingly of “scientific management” of companies as a way of increasing the speed of factory piecework.

Tarbell also wrote favorably of women as managers in factories, finding them no less capable than men. (She never fully explained why she later wrote of woman’s place being in the home, and why she opposed suffrage for women.) She also sharply criticized unsafe work conditions, especially in American mines and in the garment-manufacturing sweatshops of New York City. It is possible to detect a shift from her fact-based reporting on Standard Oil to warmer and more compassionate pleas for attention to worker welfare.

Tarbell’s lifetime of journalism made it possible for her readers to experience in painstaking detail some of the important but distant issues affecting their lives. And through her unmistakable fact-based approach, she still makes it possible for today’s readers to gain insight in the personalities, workplaces and issues of her time.

Robert Kochersberger is an associate professor at North Carolina State University whose master’s thesis was on Tarbell’s work at The Chatauquan. He is also the author of a book on Tarbell and is currently researching her time in Paris.