Larry Kramer

Born April 24, 1950, is president and publisher of USA Today. Prior to that he was an adjunct professor at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University and a media consultant. He authored “C-Scape: Conquer the Factors Changing Business Today,” (HarperCollins) in 2010. He was the first president of CBS Digital Media and founder, chairman and CEO of CBS MarketWatch. Prior to that he spent 20 years as an editor and business reporter for The Washington Post and the San Francisco Examiner. He has a BS in journalism from Syracuse and an MBA from Harvard.

From age 12, when I was a newspaper delivery boy for the Bergen Record, a suburban afternoon newspaper in a New Jersey suburb of New York City, all I wanted to do was work for a newspaper. I loved being the guy who could run into a room and tell a story first and best, and I lived for the wide eyes of the kids who would listen to me when I told them.

I never forgot that the magic was in those eyes. While I was in love with telling a story, I always knew that telling a story when no one was listening was just no fun at all. So if I could see they were bored or had heard the story before, I knew when to stop talking.

That lesson, that success was measured not by how well I told the story, but how well it was received, served me well for the rest of my life, as a journalist, as a manager and very much so as an entrepreneur.

I’m convinced that the success of Marketwatch.com can be traced to the fact that it started to serve a consumer need that we identified and the rest of the financial news industry ignored. Because we paid attention to that, and focused on those consumers, we were able to build a terrific business that was sold 7 years after it was created for $525 million.

It is, in fact, a good business story itself.

In the mid 1990s people were getting excited about Wall Street again. Tech stocks were starting to boom, and something called the Internet was giving people the sense that there might be a big change coming in how we could get information and communicate. Small start-up companies were becoming huge businesses over night.

Everyone wanted to be a part of this new gold rush, and invest in companies that would grow so quickly that even the investors would make fortunes. And there were growing beliefs that stock brokers were more worried about their own income and weren’t much help to the investors who wanted to bet big on some exciting start up companies. So people were beginning to trade for themselves at home, using a new generation of brokerages that allowed them to do so without the help of a broker.

As a business journalist and then a newspaper editor for 20 years I was acutely aware that business readers were hungry for information that could help them invest, and that most business journalism that influenced the markets was being delivered only to people who paid a lot for it and got it immediately on any one of several financial terminals, including those from Reuters, Dow Jones and Bloomberg.

Those terminals cost around $2,000 a month, and they also delivered real-time stock and bond information. Consequently most were installed in business locations and paid for by employers.

As the leading financial news businesses started to experiment on the Internet they heard a consistent message from their $2,000-a-month customers: “If you put your news on the Internet for free, we won’t be paying you $2,000-a-month for the same information.”

And we knew that the rapidly growing community of at-home day traders would demand real-time financial news to help them get through their trading day. So we decided that as long as the only good suppliers of that news made considerable money charging for it, there could be an opening for an advertising supported business that could offer the information free to the user: the model essentially used by content creators who served the mass market.

Newspaper were charging a quarter in those days because they had to prove that someone bought the paper, not because the quarter contributed a real income. If they could, they would be giving them away.

On the Internet, we didn’t need to charge anyone to prove they had read us. We could keep track of every page view. So advertisers would know exactly how many people saw their ad. They liked that and were willing to bet on this new form of information delivery. And since many new electronic brokers were popping up to serve this new audience, we had a huge list of potential advertisers who all wanted to reach our specific audience.

So we launched Marketwatch.com in October 1997. And we covered the most traded stocks first. Our readers were trading Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft and other high fliers of the time, so we needed to watch those stocks. And our reporters were just as good as those working for the “big boys.”

So to our readers, we did as well as our high-priced competitors. Gradually we built the site up by adding more and more journalists, always assigning them to the next most heavily traded companies and sectors.

When the advertising bust of 2000 occurred, we stayed the course and believed in our model, finding additional sources of revenue while we waited for advertising to return. We believed there were still huge numbers of people who wanted to read our content, but couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the price of the expensive terminals.

It worked. When advertising returned, we were still there and many of our competitors had folded or become for-pay sites. Our advertising numbers roared back and we were well on our way to building a juggernaut.

In the end, everyone in the company was so focused on our customers and what they wanted that even Dow Jones, arguably the best financial news organization in the country, was willing to pay half a million dollars for a small company with just over 100 journalists who covered the same thing as they did.

Terri Thompson

Born May 29, 1952, became director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia Graduate School of Journalism in 1993. In her 20 years as a business journalist, she has reported, written and/or edited for the Coralville (Iowa) Courier, Purchasing Magazine, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, Working Woman, U.S. News & World Report and Lear’s. A graduate of New York University and Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, and a 1981 Bagehot Fellow at Columbia, she is the author of “Biz Kids’ Guide to Success: Money-Making Ideas for Young Entrepreneurs” (Barron’s, 1992) and editor of “Writing About Business: The New Columbia Knight-Bagehot Guide to Economics and Business Journalism” (Columbia University Press, 2000). A former president of the New York Financial Writers’ Association, Thompson is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, including the NYFWA’s Elliott V. Bell award for making a significant, long-term contribution to the profession of financial journalism.

In the early 1970s, business reporting was still much a backwater in journalism — a bleak wasteland. As veteran business journalist Chris Welles once recalled, “If you did a lousy job covering city hall, couldn’t hack it writing obits, weren’t too swift taking classified ads over the telephone, then they sent you to the business section. Maybe they even made you business editor.”

But by the mid-1970s, with the looming oil crisis, the near bankruptcy of New York City, and the simultaneous appearance of both recession and inflation, business and economics became front-page news. And in 1975, Columbia University gave birth to the Walter Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism.

The brainchild of Elie Abel, then dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, the “Bagehot” was to be similar to the Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, a program for mid-career journalists who wanted to spend an academic year at Columbia. But unlike the Nieman, the Bagehot was to be rigorous: at least five courses per semester, complete with final exams.

Training journalists, not academics, the program would be rooted in the Journalism School, with special seminars and dinners tailored specifically to the needs of journalists; at the same time, Fellows would study economics and business, drawing on the resources of the entire university.

The co-founding directors of the Bagehot Program were Steve Shepard, who later became my boss at BusinessWeek, and Soma Golden of The New York Times. I once asked Steve why in the world they named the program after an Englishman (Walter Bagehot had been an editor of the Economist a century earlier) and why after someone whose name was sure to be mispronounced. He responded, “Well, we couldn’t think of an eminent American journalist, a Walter Lippmann, of economics. Those who didn’t know his name would just have to learn.”

The name, by the way, is pronounced BADGE-it. The program was renamed the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in 1987 following a major endowment gift from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Shepard and Golden each ran the program for one year. The directors who followed were Welles, the eminent journalist who passed away in 2010; Mary Bralove, formerly of The Wall Street Journal; Pamela Hollie Kluge from The New York Times; and Pauline Tai from Money magazine. I’ve been director since 1993.

Much has changed in the nearly four decades since the Fellowship was founded. In many ways, the world has gotten smaller as developments in technology and the growth of the Internet have brought us closer together. But one thing has not changed. Business and economics are complicated, and writing about them is risky. Every day holds a chance for mistakes, misunderstandings, and misrepresentations. A careless error in an investment story could cost an investor thousands of dollars.

The fact that business and economics touch people’s lives so directly puts incredible demands on journalists to be accurate, reliable and thorough. Indeed, business journalists must be able to understand the intricacies of the field and write about them in clear, concise, intelligible prose.

The purpose of the Knight-Bagehot program is to reduce the risk of careless reporting through rigorous education, and to empower business reporters to feel more confident in their writing. Increasingly, editors staffing business sections realize that to cover the field effectively, reporters need specialized experience and training. And throughout the years they have become more willing to grant their reporters the nine-month leave of absence that is required to complete the Fellowship.

In May 2013, Columbia will graduate its 38th class of Bagehots, and 342 accomplished journalists will have completed this rigorous program. Nearly a fifth of Bagehot graduates found the fellowship year so invigorating that they applied and were accepted for admission to Columbia Business School to complete an MBA degree.

The majority of Bagehot alumni, including those with MBAs, have remained in the field of journalism and have turned their personal academic enrichment into enriched journalism. Many have gone on to win impressive journalism awards and honors. And several are sharing their knowledge and expertise as teachers and educators.

In 1996, we began recognizing the work of our accomplished alumni by awarding the “Best of Knight-Bagehot” at our annual fundraising dinners. Renamed the Christopher J. Welles Memorial Prize in honor of our esteemed former director, the prize is presented each year to a former Bagehot Fellow whose work best epitomizes Chris’s ideals of thorough reporting, good storytelling, and timeliness.

Some of our winners wrote books, including John Authers, David Wessel, and Greg Farrell, and two of our winners, Caroline Donnelly and Peter Kibiriti, launched new business publications. All of the prize recipients were acknowledged for producing outstanding business journalism, and I am certain that Chris would be proud to know that the prize that bears his name is going to such deserving journalists.

My year as a Bagehot Fellow during Chris’s leadership literally changed my life. And while I could never hope to be the great leader or role model that Chris was, the Knight-Bagehot Program carries on the mission of its founders and continues to transform the lives of those who are fortunate enough to be granted a fellowship.