Robert Nichols

By Scott Sewell

Robert “Bob” Nichols is most notably known for his tenure at the Los Angeles Times from 1961 to 1968 as the financial editor.

Nichols believed Los Angeles would become home to major businesses and financial centers, similar to New York. He helped improve the Times financial section to attract and cover businesses in the area. Because of his commitment to Los Angeles, Nichols successfully enhanced the quality and breadth of the financial section, placing the Times in the national contention for premium financial information.

While working for the Times, Nichols won the Loeb Award in 1964 for his exceptional financial reporting, presented by the University of Connecticut (since 1973, the University of California, Los Angeles presents the award).

Nichols won the award for a multi-part series, “Price of Security.” The series reported on the large price the United States had to pay for security during the Cold War. Nichols said, “But inevitably, these human situations — to be understood or appraised economically — must be translated into man power, money and — motivation.”

At the beginning of his tenure at the Times, Nichols wrote majority of his articles on companies and industries in southern California and the West Coast.

He covered chemical sales, electronic components and blue chips, airline manufacturers and the hopeful computer industry. However, Nichols shifted his writings to cover more national financial news. Stories about the gold policy for the United States, world trade, international affects on business and the Federal Reserve dominated Nichols’ stories in his last two years at the Times.

Although he continued to publish some California-specific articles scattered in his latter years, Nichols’ transition from regional to national reporting shows he was successful in building a national following and expanding the financial section, becoming a major financial section for economic coverage.

Additionally, Nichols was a founder of the Society of American Business Writers in 1964, and became the organization’s president in 1967. Being one of the founders and figureheads, Nichols was instrumental in developing the organization to its current size and credibility that it maintains today.

The organization, now known as the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, was founded to emphasize exceptional business and economic coverage. It currently has more than 3,000 members.

Myron Kandel, founding financial editor of CNN and former SABEW president, said Nichols helped to begin formulating SABEW’s Code of Ethics, the first code of ethics for a specialized journalism organization.

After leaving the Times in 1968, Nichols worked at the Federal Reserve as a special assistant to the Board of Governors.

He left the Fed in 1970 and took the director of editorial services at Bank of America. In 1973, Nichols was promoted to director of public relations at Bank of America, where he recommended the bank to publish its Corporate Disclosure Code, an unheard move at the time in the world of commerce. Nichols served as public relations director until he retired in 1985.

Nichols was born in 1925 in Daytona Beach, Fla. He moved to the West Coast when he attended San Diego State University and became involved in local journalism organizations.

In 1996, Nichols died from cancer at the age of 71 in San Francisco, Calif.

During his brief interactions with Nichols, Kandel remembered him being a great guy to be around and a well-respected journalist.

Kandel said Nichols was “one of the outstanding business editors of his time.”

Scott Sewell is a native of Wilmington, N.C., and a business journalism major in the Class of 2015 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

John Curran

By Nick Shchetko

When Richard Teitelbaum, an investigative financial journalist, was drafting a plan to visit his old friend and colleague John Curran on the first Saturday of August 2013, he didn’t know it was not destined to happen.

John Jude Curran, 59, a prominent business journalist and editor, passed away July 5, 2013, at his home in Weston, Conn. He was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in May 2012.

Curran was born in the Bronx, New York, on Nov. 21, 1953. He graduated from Bard College in 1975, with a bachelor’s degree in languages and literature. Curran started his career at the Wall Street Transcript, but is best known for work at Fortune, the magazine he joined in 1978.

In more than a three-decade career span, Curran wrote himself and directed coverage of business, investing and finance for Mutual Funds magazine, Fortune and Time.com, to name a few.

Curran was also appearing extensively on television, as a business commentator on the “NBC News at Sunrise” television program. He left Time Inc. to join Bloomberg News in late 2010 as a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets magazine. His most recent position was news director at Bloomberg.com.

Curran excelled in coverage of international markets. He won the Overseas Press Club Award for Japan coverage, and a Time Inc. Luce Award for commissioning and publishing a story on the threat of global terrorism coming to the US, half a year before 9/11 attack.

Andy Serwer, managing editor of Fortune, who worked with Curran in 1980s and 1990s, said that “John was a very smart … and creative guy.”

“Sometimes you would think of creativity is being a great cellist … but journalist can be creative too, and he was,” Serwer said. “He would really study and find new ways to cover investing and Wall Street, and so, he was very creative that way.”

Curran realized the importance of Eugene Fama’s work on markets and asset pricing before it became a hot topic and long before 2013, when Fama became a Nobel Prize laureate. “John was sure very early on discovering the importance of this work,” Serwer said.

“A rare journalist. Great intelligence, great integrity, great wordsmith,” said Steven Mintz, financial writer and author, who remained in touch with Curran for almost two decades.

As the editor, Curran was tough and demanding, his colleagues agree.

“He was … a somewhat overbearing boss, to be frank,” said Teitelbaum, who started worked with Curran in 1989 at Fortune.

He had a “good bullshit detector,” said Serwer. “When you were trying to like coast or get by, he’d picked up on it right away and call you on it.”

John Huey, the former editor-in-chief of Time Inc., who worked with Curran in Fortune, in a comment to Bloomberg said that “John … never took the cheap route to a conclusion or a story.”

“He was famously inflexible with deadlines,” said Teitelbaum. “To the point where you’d be there at 12.30 at night and he’d say: “I need that when I come in at 7.”

Curran was “an inextricable workaholic” with “a little bit of machismo,” Teitelbaum said. He recalled that once after appendicitis operation, Curran was back in the office on the next day.

“John was driven … Sometimes people, you know, go through the motions, I wouldn’t say that ever about him,” said Serwer.

Ruchika Tulshyan, who interned at Time in the summer of 2010, said that despite she was one of the youngest interns, Curran noticed her passion for business writing and encouraged her to pitch stories.

“He would work with me tirelessly to polish my ideas,” said Tulshyan. By the end of her internship, she said that one of her business stories became the most read story of the month on Time.com.

“He gave me a chance at a time when many editors just viewed interns as rotating summer help … He continues to be the benchmark when I work with editors,” said Tulshyan.

While tough as the boss, “John the friend and father was warm, funny, emotional and fiercely loyal,” said Rik Kirkland in a comment to WestportNow. Kirkland, now with McKinsey, joined Fortune with Curran in the fall of 1978.

Teitelbaum recalls that when he was diagnosed with leukemia in 1994, Curran became supportive: “he came down with a colleague and visited me the first day there.”

“He was a brilliant, well-respected finance writer who had studied drama at Bard, favored khakis and tennis shoes, and admitted with amusement that his own finances were a mess. You just had to love him, and everybody did,” said Nancy Perry Graham, his lifelong friend and former colleague at Fortune.

“Nobody made me laugh harder than John. His ability to pinpoint the absurdities of life, with a wry, clever aside, was unequaled,” she said.

Curran is survived by his wife, Joan, and their four children: Alissa, Alexandra, Joanna, and John Richard Curran.

“If ever two people were perfect for each other, it was John and Joan,” said Graham.

Family was immensely important to Curran. “He was spending an enormous amount of time … with his siblings, his extended family. It seemed to be a really happy big Irish family,” said Teitelbaum.

In January 2013 Curran wrote in a short piece for AARP.org that his diagnosis didn’t make him unhappy: “At its core, my happiness rests on a spiritual life, a sense of purpose and — oh, yes — a sense of humor. In this life, where beauty fades, wealth wreaks more havoc than happiness and death awaits us all, if you can’t laugh about the journey’s ups and downs, you’ll fret. And who wants to worry?”

Nick Shchetko is a journalist from Belarus who has been covering technology companies in print and online media since 2001. A Muskie Fellow, Nick is working on his master’s degree in Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.