David Morrow

By Michael Leibel

In what seemed to contradict the serious, busy attitude of Wall Street, David J. Morrow brought a calm, steady hand and a witty, sharp voice to a then-struggling financial news website and led it to success.

TheStreet.com co-founder and writer Jim Cramer credits Morrow for the website’s turnaround. Not only did Morrow value the input of his readers, he was also able to turn this feedback into news that mattered to his audience.

“He insisted on the highest quality journalism,” Cramer said, “and he always wanted to give the readers what they wanted – actionable, honest news that they could profit from.”

Morrow was born on Dec. 18, 1960, in Spartanburg, S.C. He attended the University of South Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communications and graduated in 1983 with a bachelor’s degree.

Morrow worked as a reporter for Fortune upon graduating. In a story in 1988, he was tasked with interviewing real estate mogul Donald Trump. In his reporting, Morrow was able to talk his way into pulling Trump’s bizarre hair to see if it was real.

“Squealing ‘Ooooh, you’re bad,’ he will let a reporter tug on his hair to test the rumor that he wears a rug,” Morrow wrote about a usually humorless Trump. “He doesn’t seem to; he does use hair spray.”

In 1993, he worked briefly with the Detroit Free Press as the Japan bureau chief, covering the automobile industry. After his stint in Japan, Morrow became a feature writer and articles editor for Smart Money Magazine.

Toni Simonetti, former executive director of corporate communications for General Motors, remembered Morrow’s thoughtfulness, recollecting advice he gave her in Detroit before she left to work in New York City.

“We had a parting lunch that week,” Simonetti said. “I still have the paper tablecloth upon which he sketched a guide for living in the city.”

Morrow was offered a job with the New York Times in 1996 as a business reporter. There, he covered personal finance, aviation and the pharmaceuticals industries.

In 2001, Morrow was hired by Cramer to become the editor in chief of TheStreet.com. Cramer hoped Morrow would bring the same performance and voice to the website that he did when working for Smart Money.

Earlier in the year, the website had laid off 40 people, roughly 20 percent of its workforce, in a restructuring attempt to reach profitability. In addition to the layoffs, which saw several senior editors and writers being dismissed, Morrow had to deal with the butting personalities of many of the analysts and bring a sense of unity to the newsroom.

“He steered us through some real tough times,” Cramer added.

Morrow undertook several initiatives to improve TheStreet.com. He created a premium section spinoff of the website called Real Money, which featured asset investment advice from well-renowned analysts and portfolio managers. Readers could access this content by paying a monthly subscription fee.

Morrow also created several columns, which gave TheStreet.com a unique, sharp voice. Among them, “The Five Dumbest Things On Wall Street This Week,” became a reader favorite. The weekly feature ridicules the stupid and sometimes insane actions of Wall Street and corporate America.

Another column, “Mutual Monday,” gave readers an in-depth look at decisions made by fund managers. The daylong event also gave advice on funds to buy and sell, as well as interviews with leading fund managers.

“People like a little levity with their business news,” Cramer said when asked why he believes the columns became so popular. “Dave got that.”

Inside the newsroom, Morrow was able to get his writers to believe in the website. People began to have fun. Morrow’s leadership gave staff a sense of trust in the organization and allowed him to hold writers to higher standards.

And this effort produced results. TheStreet.com reported its first profit in 2005, partially due to the new content that attracted readers to the site. A year later, “The Five Dumbest Things On Wall Street This Week” won SABEW’s Best in Business Award in the column category.

Under Morrow’s guidance, TheStreet.com became a trusted and reputable financial news source. During his tenure as editor in chief, TheStreet.com won five SABEW awards, one Loeb award, two New York Press Club awards and four awards from the Media Industry Newsletter, in addition to numerous nominations. Morrow also received MIN’s Best Editor of a Web Site Award in 2007.

Morrow ended his position with TheStreet.com and became the first Donald W. Reynolds endowed chair in business journalism at the University of Nevada-Reno in the summer of 2009. Shortly after, Morrow died of pancreatic cancer at the age of 49 in 2010.

Morrow’s legacy continues to live on, however. In honor of his contributions to business journalism, the University of South Carolina, with the help of SABEW, created a fund that supports undergraduate or graduate students interested in business journalism.

It will be hard for any business journalist to follow Morrow’s act, which brought humor, wit and, most importantly, fun to Wall Street.

Michael Leibel is a business journalism major from Chapel Hill in the Class of 2014 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Jeffrey Zaslow

By Michelle Neeley

Tucked in among the business and economic news of the day in The Wall Street Journal are light and quirky stories, a nod to the reader, showing that the Journal recognizes their humanity and their desire to see a side of life that is lighter than just bright financial futures.

The A-hed spot on the front page is coveted by Journal reporters, and for Jeffrey Zaslow, it was one of the reasons he began writing for the paper.

In 1983, the young reporter took a job with the Journal as a commodities reporter.

“He had a very, kind of geeky business beat writing about futures and stuff like that. From very early on, he had his sights set on the A-hed feature,” Zaslow’s colleague and future editor, Mike Miller, said.  “He was always trying to find ways to get into that slot, whether it was directly from his beat or something on the side that he would find. For years, that was his home.”

One of his A-hed features he was about a national contest to replace the Chicago Sun-Times’ Ann Landers, a nationally syndicated advice columnist that was leaving the Sun-Times for a job at the Chicago Tribune. As part of his approach to writing the story, he entered the contest and ended up winning.

Zaslow left the Journal for the Sun-Times in 1987, where he remained for 14 years as an advice columnist.

“He turned it into a completely different kind of column,” his wife Sherry Margolis said. “It was still an advice column, but he made it interactive. He made it funny and unorthodox and different—it was great.”

During his time with the Sun-Times, Zaslow also led many fundraising efforts. For 12 years, he put on an event called Zazz Bash, a pre-online dating era singles party, that raised money for homeless shelters and other charities. The Zazz Bashes resulted in 78 marriages.

After his position at the Sun-Times was eliminated, Zaslow returned to the Journal and began writing “Moving On,” a column in the Personal Journal section that focused on life transitions.

“In those columns his personality was so obvious because he wrote with such compassion and such sensitivity and such heart,” Margolis said.

As a father to three daughters, Zaslow was in tune with family matters and would incorporate personal experiences into his articles.

“He was very much aware of the issues that girls face. He was sensitive to that and he wrote about all these things that girls worry about like body image, dating and self esteem,” Margolis said.

His oldest daughter, Jordan Zaslow, reflected on a particular time when he was writing an article about the words ‘I love you.’

“Everywhere he went, he would ask people about how they felt, and it was fun to hear people’s responses. It was cute how invested he was in the story and the length he would take to get the story and get people’s opinions,” Jordan Zaslow said.

“He was a very special human being and those special qualities were reflected in his writing,” Margolis said.

Zaslow was able to write in such a way that the five million readers of the Journal would feel like he was talking to each one of them individually, Miller said.

“Even after he became a bestselling author and was juggling book projects, he very intensely wanted to maintain his connection with the Journal,” Miller said.

Zaslow began his career as an author with a book called The Last Lecture, inspired by a column that he wrote about a dying Carnegie Mellon professor.

While touring for his final book, The Magic Room, he was killed in a car crash in northern Michigan at the age of 53.

It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to say that Zaslow was an ‘A-hed-like’ reporter. Filled with wit, charisma and compassion he was the type of person that was genuinely interested in others, Margolis said.

“The really remarkable thing is that he wrote for this financial newspaper,” Margolis said. “People read The Wall Street Journal to find out about who’s taking over what company and how their stocks are doing. His column took off because that was what people were hoping for.  Humans read that paper, and they are looking for more than just stock and financial information.”

And Zaslow delivered.

Michelle Neeley is a native of Tampa, Fla., and a business journalism major in the Class of 2016 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Ben Schifman

By Olivia Lanier

Ben Schifman, longtime financial reporter and executive of The Kansas City Star, committed himself to raising the standards of business journalism.

Born in Kansas City on April 20, 1913, Schifman attended Humboldt and Manual Training High, quitting before graduation to help support his brothers and sisters when the nation fell on hard times.

He later attended night school at the Kansas City Junior College, law school, and the American Institute of Banking.

Schifman wed Mary Lapin in 1937, and their marriage would last 61 years until he passed away on Sept. 23, 1998.

Schifman’s son, Bill, said that as a young child, his dad sold newspapers for pocket change.

“It gets very cold in Kansas City in the winter and my dad didn’t have gloves, so his fingers would stick to the coins when he placed his hands in his pockets.”

For this reason, Schifman never carried coins, even when he grew older and became the largest stockholder of The Kansas City Star.

Schifman began working at The Star in 1934 as a temp, reporting on produce, livestock, and grain and moved on to the banking and corporate reporting end in 1935.  With the help of willing mentors, he became financial editor in 1954.

In 1936, Schifman started The Star’s first daily financial column.

“I believe the daily financial column, ‘On the Financial Front,’ is what made my father unique,” Bill said.  “It wasn’t like today with the internet.  For 47 years, my father would walk downtown to the financial district in search of articles.  He would go from business to business, meeting all the owners and would write stories on them.”

Janet Meyer-Miller, a longtime coworker and eventual successor to Schifman, shared his daily routine in an obituary.  She said he would read The Wall Street Journal, smoke a cigar and make phone calls before trudging off in search of a story.

“I think that was my dad’s signature,” Bill said. “The way he handled the local Kansas City business.”

The problem for financial reporters at the time Schifman began his journalism career was the lack of laws governing the disclosure of financial information by publicly held companies.

Schifman became one of few reporters in the country who could establish approximate earnings and figures for various banking firms by figuring the differences in capital account numbers and bonuses paid.

Worried that his estimates were too low, firms decided to disclose their actual numbers.  This discovery made Schifman’s column well known for its detailed coverage of corporate finance.

In 1962, Schifman received the Gerald Loeb Award for predicting the crash of the stock market earlier that year.  He was named an “outstanding financial writer for his contribution to better understanding and appreciation of the American Free Enterprise system.”

Schifman also placed his efforts into buying the paper’s stock.

“My dad believed that because he was on the financial end of the paper, he could see what was a very good investment, so he was always trying to buy stock,” Bill said. “My mom always used to say, ‘Ben, I want to take a trip,’ but my dad would always say we couldn’t afford it, but mom knew this was because he kept buying Star stock.”

As the company’s leading shareholder, Schifman negotiated the sale of the newspaper to Capital Cities Communications Inc. in 1977.

Aside from the reporting end of the paper, Schifman also became involved in a number of executive roles.  He became investment editor in 1961, and in the following year, assistant treasurer. In 1968, he was elected treasurer and in 1971, financial vice-president.

He also played an instrumental role in the creation of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, serving as its second president from 1966-1967.

Schifman’s nephew, Edward, said that his uncle was known for his disheveled look.

“Regardless of what he had going on that day, an interview, meeting, etc., he’d always looked like he’d slept in his suit.  He didn’t care about impressing people, whether or not his tie was on properly, or his suits were neatly pressed.”

Schifman presented his financial stories similar to the way he presented himself.  He wasn’t concerned with reporting good or bad stocks; he didn’t try to make the market, that wasn’t his job.  His job was to report the market the way it stood, and that’s what he did.

“The legacy he left behind was integrity,” said Bill. “Over 47 years of reporting, he was never accused of doing anything illegal, having insider information.  He was a man of his word, and he always instilled in his kids that the only thing you really have is your name, so make sure you have a good one.”

Olivia Lanier is a native of Jacksonville, N.C., and a business journalism major in the class of 2016 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill