By Katie McNulty

James J. Mitchell

As business editor and as a business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, Mitchell used his writing to keep his audience grounded as Silicon Valley was experiencing astounding technology and economic accomplishments.

Mitchell, a native of California, grew up in Santa Barbara. Upon graduating from Yale in 1967, he went on to study at the University of Wisconsin and earned graduate degrees in Latin American studies and journalism.

He received his first newspaper job at the Charlotte Observer. Mitchell then went on to the San Diego Union as a business reporter.

For Mitchell, 1977 was an exciting year. That was the year that he married his wife, Susie Sutton. It was also the year that he became the business editor of The San Jose Mercury News.

“He was business editor of the San Jose Mercury News at a time when technology news was developing into a very powerful era, and he was on the early stages of developing sophisticated coverage of technology business,” said Michael Millican former business editor of the Associated Press.

As business editor, Mitchell reminded his team to learn from lessons in history and to keep things in perspective.

During the ’70s and ’80s, Silicon Valley was an important economic center, and technology was at the heart of it.  At a time when news coverage of business tended to be perfunctory and routine, Mitchell and the journalists at the Mercury News significantly elevated the public’s understanding of business news in general and technology news in particular.

“The improvement of coverage of business technology and the development of business technology in Silicon Valley went hand in glove, and Jim was a key part of that,” said Millican.

While Mitchell was at the Mercury News, he was an influence in the stunning increase of staff members in the technology department. The staff started with 12 members, but by August 2000 there were 70 business journalists, a full television studio in the newsroom, and an online website.

“To have a staff of over 50 is just astounding,” said David Beal, former Society of American Business Editors and Writers president and former business editor for the St. Paul Pioneer Press.

Mitchell left the business editor position at the Mercury News in the early ’90s to become a full time business columnist at the paper. As a business columnist, Mitchell wrote about the expansion of Silicon Valley and topics such as the dot-com boom and the high increase in stocks of technology companies. The stock increases of the dot-com boom eventually led to the dot-com crash in the early 2000s.

Many young reporters flocked to Silicon Valley to cover the boom in technology, but they lacked what Mitchell had: a homegrown council.

“He brought a long term view as to where technology was going, where San Jose fit in that growth pattern and how things worked in the city. He knew more than just business,” said Peter Hillan, former executive business editor of the Mercury News when Mitchell was a business columnist.

Hillan continued, “Jim provided the steady reminder that San Jose used to be orchards.”

Mitchell was important to business journalism during this time because he helped his audience to remember where San Jose used to be, and there is value providing this perspective. This is what set Mitchell apart from the rest of the journalists covering Silicon Valley.

In 1984, Mitchell was the president of SABEW. As president, he oversaw the expansion of its headquarters at the University of Missouri. The following year he went to Stanford to study as a Knight Fellow.

Mitchell had a long and successful career. Mitchell led and developed the business department up until the early ‘90s during a significant transition of growth. He left the Mercury News when he felt as if the transition was complete, and he wanted to spend time with his family.

“Everybody enjoyed his company. He was very wise and experienced,” said Hillan.

In January of 2005, Mitchell died of salivary gland cancer. He is survived by his two sons, Jack and Rob.

Katie McNulty is a native of Barrington, Ill., and an advertising major in the Class of 2015 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Albert Altwegg

By Andrew Willard

The business desk of The Dallas Morning News in 1980 was little more than a small classroom where Al Altwegg presided over his eight pupils.

As business editor, Altwegg taught the tools of the trade just before the beat came into vogue.

“Business news was where the paper stuck people that they didn’t know what to do with,” said Cheryl Hall, who Altwegg hired as an intern in the summer of 1972.

But Altwegg was not concerned with glamor; he preferred being an active participant in the Dallas economy.

In his unpublished autobiography, Altegg talks about how he felt when he was asked to be business editor – and the relief he would bring to his predecessor.

“I was interested in business and what was going on in the business world, whereas Hand was mainly interested in automobiles,” he said in the book.

Altwegg was born in a small town in Wisconsin, but because of his Swiss father, the Midwestern child was a world traveler by the time he was a teenager.

Altwegg was raised in Germany and Switzerland after his father was offered a position managing an evaporated milk plant in the area.  He later attended an American High School in Paris.

Hall said Altegg was a conscientious objector during World War II – she said he didn’t like the idea of killing people he had grown up with.  She believes his moralist attitude carried into his reporting, calling him a man of great ethics.

Altwegg graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in the spring of 1938, after studying what he called the essential curricula for any aspiring business man.  After finishing his education, Altwegg took to the road, driving across Iowa in pursuit of a job.

He finally found employment at the Herald & Review in Decatur, Ill where he got his first experience in the field of reporting.  But more important than a job, Altwegg found two people who changed his life: Martha Maloney and Dick Weicker.

With Weicker, Altwegg was able to buy the Arlington Journal, which he ultimately abandoned after it merged with another paper in 1956.  With Maloney, Altwegg found a wife and a future mother who would go on to bear his two children, Chris and Libby Altwegg.

Three years after the Arlington Journal venture failed, Altwegg joined the business news staff of The Morning News; one year after joining he was asked to be the business editor.

Dennis Fulton, current business editor at The Morning News, started working at the paper in 1977, three years before Altwegg retired.

By that time, Altwegg had been the editor for almost 20 years, and Fulton said he had an apparent effect on economic development.

“He did help bring the community together, and I know he had a huge following among the business leaders,” he said.

Chris Altwegg said his father had such strong relationships with the business owners, that the family could always expect extra presents at Christmas time, even though Altwegg would give most of them away.

“He always felt that it was important that people appreciate the business economy in Dallas,” Chris Altwegg said.

“But at the same time, not kowtow like you see some cities and states do these days.”

And even more than the business leaders, Chris Altwegg said his father felt an obligation to nurture his reporters.

“I have often said that (The Dallas Morning News) in those days reminded me of an old Southern plantation, where once you were one of their slaves, they felt responsible for you for the rest of your life,” Altwegg said in his autobiography.

After Altwegg retired in 1980, his old stomping grounds reached new heights.

“He just missed the the big surge in business journalism,” Fulton said.  “(Altwegg) would’ve loved to see that.”

Fulton said the size of the staff grew tremendously during the 1980s and then peaked in the 1990s before leveling out in the 2000s.

Altwegg suffered from a stroke in the early 1990s that left him unable to speak properly, but he was able to share what he was thinking about by pointing to the stories he had written in his autobiography.

Altwegg died on July 5, 2001 due to health issues brought on by his declining health.

Hall said Altwegg used to say that business news was as simple as finding out what people eat for dinner.

“Some eat steak some eat hamburger and some don’t eat very well at all,” she recalled.

“He showed me that business was a vibrant beat, and, in fact, you could make a business story out of anything.”

Andy Willard is a broadcast journalism major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Class of 2015, and works for The Daily Tar Heel.  He is a native of Jamestown, N.C.

Stanley Cohen

By Andrew Stern

Rick Gordon, former Advertising Age editor and protégé of Stanley Cohen, worked with Cohen for 10 years in the Washington bureau.

“There are some journalists who write because that’s what they do for work,” said Gordon. “I think that writing, putting his thoughts on paper, arguing a case, for Stan, writing was like breathing.”

Cohen worked for Advertising Age for 45 years, almost entirely as its Washington editor and bureau chief. He died in 2013 at the age of 93.

Even though he worked for the primary advertising and marketing trade publication, Cohen was often critical of the industries he covered — especially when he felt advertisers were making exaggerated or false claims. His work as a reporter, columnist and editorialist helped pave the way for the consumer protection movement of the 1960s.

“Stan had a very keen appreciation of the economic functionality of advertising and that it had a very important role to play, but wondered how could you get it to perform in a more effective, honest and useful way than some of the practices that it had fallen into,” Gordon said.

“A lot of the things he suggested became law or regulations and in the long term, helped the ad industry even though they didn’t realize it at the time. A lot of the steps really did give the industry more credibility because consumers now had assurance that what was claimed was indeed true,” said David Snyder, publisher of Crain’s Chicago Business and former Washington bureau researcher under Cohen.

“One of the things that Stan demonstrated at Advertising Age is that a great journalist, and a great business journal, could really help change the thinking of the industry they covered,” Gordon said.

Cohen grew up in Troy, N.Y., as the son of a shopkeeper. He discovered journalism in high school and attended Cornell University to pursue it further. While at Cornell, he rose to the position of editor at The Cornell Daily Sun.

After graduating from Cornell in 1941, Cohen earned a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1942. He went to work for Broadcasting Magazine for a year before going on the final job interview he would ever have; he worked for Advertising Age for the next 44 years.

Those who worked for and with Cohen are quick to laud his efforts as editor, teacher and mentor.

“He was a no-nonsense editor. He could instantly identify inconsistencies or holes in stories, and he knew the industry so darn well that if you were off base on anything, it would be apparent to him immediately. But, he wasn’t punitive in his editing style — he used it as a teaching experience, not as a scolding experience,” Snyder said.

Rance Crain, president and editorial director of Crain Communications, first worked for his family’s company as a reporter in the Washington bureau under Cohen. In the obituary he wrote of Cohen, Crain described him as “my first boss in 1960 when I was fresh out of college, and my best boss. He ingrained in me that what’s best for consumers is best for advertisers, and that continues to be our editorial position.”

Both Snyder and Gordon recall fond memories of Cohen, but Gordon was quick to point out Cohen’s “Energy. Humor. A finely honed sense of indignation about things that weren’t right as he saw them… He was extremely generous with his time, genuinely liked to teach and took immense pride in whenever one of his students did good work.”

Snyder started his career under Cohen and works at Crain Communications to this day. “I can still picture his coke-bottle thick glasses, his style of typing with one index finger on each hand, hunting and pecking away,” Snyder said. “Thirty-one years later, I’m still here at Crain’s. I can attribute a lot of that to the guidance and counseling Stan gave me as an aspiring business journalist entering the business.”

Cohen’s final byline ran in March 2005’s “75 Years of Ideas” issue. In it he wrote: “I know none among my peers who had better reason to feel their years in journalism were well-spent. And that included the satisfaction of knowing that I had fulfilled the hopes of my employers by enabling them to do well by doing good.”

“He was a wonderful model not just for business journalism, but for anyone in journalism,” Gordon said. “He was a dynamo. A real dynamo.”

Andrew Stern is a journalism master’s candidate at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill specializing in digital multimedia production and writing. He is from Little Rock, Ark. and received his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.