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.

Vermont Royster

By Chris Roush

At the beginning of the 21st century, the TJFR Group, publisher of a newsletter about business journalists, and MasterCard International honored the top 100 business news journalists of the previous century.

Vermont Royster, editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1958 to 1971, ranked fifth among the greatest business journalists of the 20th century. The judges noted that Royster “helped build the paper’s reputation as the nation’s most intelligent voice for business reporting.”

The recognition was well deserved, but in reality Royster spent the bulk of his career as a general interest columnist and editorial writer, not a business journalist. “I didn’t think of him as a business journalist even though he wrote for The Journal,” said his daughter Eleanor Eidels. “I don’t think he really saw himself that way either. He was a thinker and a writer about all kinds of things.”

It was only during his time in the Washington bureau from 1936 to the end of 1939, and then in 1946-47 after he returned from World War II, that he was primarily a business journalist. While he often wrote columns and editorials about business issues, he was not a full-time business journalist in the way other journalists on the list had been. In 1975, he did receive a Gerald Loeb Award, the highest honor in business journalism, for his columns on business and economics topics.

As editor of the country’s top business newspaper, however, Royster was often called upon to provide thoughts and guidance on the future of business journalism. In this way he influenced the field of business journalism more so than by any reporting and coverage he might have done.

For example, Royster wrote a detailed article in 1960 for The Quill, the publication of the leading journalism organization Sigma Delta Chi, about the ethics of business journalists. In it he defined some of the basic tenets of the practice of business journalism, three years before the creation of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Royster explained how business journalists should be held to a higher standard than other reporters and editors. While a reporter covering a fire can exaggerate the size of a fire without hurting anyone, a business journalist cannot inflate or deflate such facts. “And the reporter who does this may directly injure a great many people,” wrote Royster. “For so long as the error stands uncorrected, people – the reporter’s readers – are going to act on the information he gave them. They will buy and sell the stock and the error will cost them money. They have been injured by their trust in the reporter’s accuracy.”

Royster warned business journalists not to run “dope” stories full of “scanty and unverifiable information.” He also cautioned newspapers on how they conducted polls related to business issues. While a wrong poll on the eve of an election might only make the paper look ridiculous, he wrote, an incorrect poll on steel inventory levels on the eve of a strike could affect decisions made by the union, the management of the steel companies, and other companies who relied on the steel to make their products.

Royster expressed his desire for business journalists to resist the temptation to “jazz up the lead with exaggeration” even though such a lead paragraph might be permissible in sports reporting. He also cautioned business reporters to resist influence from advertisers. “I know of no other field of journalism where ethics calls for greater self-discipline in accuracy, thoroughness, clarity and completeness than the area of business journalism,” wrote Royster.

A decade later, shortly before his full-time retirement, Royster sounded the alarm about the quality of business journalism in the country, calling it lousy and blaming newspapers for creating a harmful distinction between business news and other news. He said, “It’s part of the basic life of a community – there’s nothing that has more effect on a community than the business situation. These are bread-and-butter matters to every citizen.”

Royster noted that smaller papers in the country were trying to provide business coverage such as stock market news and insight like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, but that was a mistake. They should focus their coverage on local industries.

Royster was far ahead of his time. Business journalism underwent a great growth period in the 1980s and 1990s during the country’s economic expansion. Problems remained, including the activities of reporters and editors who were not trained to write about business and economic issues, and a paucity of critical coverage and inquiry into the practices of companies.

Royster could relate to the lack of training. “When I started,” he said, “I didn’t know any more about business reporting than a jackass. I’m not sure that I do now.”

Royster died in 1996. He won two Pulitzer Prizes – in 1953 and 1984.

Chris Roush is senior associate dean of the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Journalism and Mass Communication, where he directs the business journalism program. He is also the author or co-author of three books on business journalism and the author of the upcoming “Thinking Things Over: Vermont Royster’s Influence at The Wall Street Journal,” due out in fall 2013.