By Susan Lisovicz

Susan Lisovicz is a returning Reynolds Center visiting business journalism professor at the Walter Cronkite School for Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. She covered many of the major business stories of the last two decades as an on-air correspondent for CNN and CNBC, from the dot-com boom to 9/11 to the housing bubble and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. She contributes to the Huffington Post and is a former president of the New York Financial Writers’ Association.

It was less than an hour before the stock market was set to open on Sept. 11, 2001. The farthest thought from then-CNBC anchor Ron Insana’s mind was that his life would soon be in danger.

“Being caught in the cloud, a half block from the falling towers was, at once, both a terrifying and oddly compelling moment. In personal terms, I thought I would not survive the experience, for some period of time when I was hiding in a parked car amid the debris,” said Insana. “In professional terms, I knew I was involved in covering the largest story of my life. It required… a certain detachment and restraint, even as the world, as we then knew it, had just changed so dramatically.”

I was struggling for that restraint when the New York Stock Exchange reopened the following week. Outside, it was a war zone. Inside, there was a determination to show the world it was business as usual. Stocks collapsed into free fall, but traders erupted into thunderous applause. First responders had entered the room.

The resilience of America in those dark days as illustrated on live TV through the resumption of a simple but powerful ritual: the opening bell.

Business news defined the major story of that day and the tumultuous decade to follow. The housing bubble — and bust — and the worst recession since the Great Depression all unfolded in breathless detail on the small screen.

By now most of us know: ignore business news at your peril. “It’s about the global economy, the financial health and welfare of the nation and its citizens,” said Insana. “We don’t just vote with our pocketbooks, we live through them so… (it) has a profound impact on very important aspects of everyone’s life.”

Yes, business news has substance. But it’s also got colorful characters. And boy oh boy, does it have drama — it’s made for TV. For those of us lucky enough to have front row seats to Wall Street’s own reality show, there are amazing stories.

About villains: “I remember running out of the federal courthouse after Ivan Boesky’s (insider trading) plea,” said Allan Chernoff, senior vice president at Fleishman-Hillard and a former correspondent at CNN and CNBC. “We got the money shot of a lifetime directly in front of Boesky as he attempted to make his way to a waiting vehicle. That was a great rush.”

And moguls: “I did one of the first TV interviews with Bill Gates in 1989, when he was a curious, bespectacled billionaire that few people outside the tech world had heard of,” recalls Maricopa County Communications Director and former CNBC correspondent Jerry Cobb.

And crisis: “During the savings and loan trauma, whenever I did a stand-up in front of a bank I’d have to talk quickly and leave with the crew right away because crowds would quickly form — straining to hear if the institution was about to go belly up,” says Andrew Leckey, president of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism and a former anchor with CNBC.

And to think that TV business programming had once been of interest only to businessmen of a certain age and income. In the pre-cable TV days, business news was confined to broadcasting’s backwaters. Or as CNN’s founding financial editor Myron Kandel calls it: “The wasteland — because it wasn’t being covered. Each of the three networks had a financial correspondent who was lucky to get on the air once or twice a week.”

Unless you went to PBS. Louis Rukeyser pioneered TV business news programming in 1970. “Wall $treet Week” was described as a Mister Rukeyser’s Neighborhood for grownups. He memorably consoled viewers after the ’87 crash saying, “It’s just your money. It’s not your life. The figures on a broker’s report mean little compared to that. The people who loved you a week ago still love you today.”

But even Rukeyser had precious little time to counsel viewers: his show only aired once a week.

CNN, launched seven years earlier, had no such barriers. The ’87 crash was the story when business news came of age. “We covered it around the clock. When Wall Street closed and Asia opened, we covered it,” says Kandel. “Then Europe opened. We covered it. It was the first business news story to be covered around the clock.”

Live coverage called for a change in the look of financial programming. In came the now ubiquitous stock ticker, but the industry look was still quite primitive.

Here’s Chernoff’s recollection of financial segments from KWHY-TV in Los Angeles: “The station had scoreboards behind the anchors showing stock indices and prices. When prices would change, the numbers flipping on the scoreboard made it sound as if producers were popping popcorn in the background.”

Eventually financial news borrowed a page from ESPN’s Sports Center. “The launch of ‘Squawk Box’ on CNBC was the ultimate expression of the desire to have a pre-game show that led to half-time reports, final-hour coverage and post-game analysis,” says Insana. “It made the news more accessible and entertaining—and busy.”

Statistics were suddenly sexy. The Dow, NASDAQ, S&P 500 levels, bond yields, soybean futures, crude prices and treasury yields in primary colors all squeezed in above, below and on the side of the ever-shrinking space allocated to the TV anchor.

October 1987’s Black Monday, with its 22.5 percent plunge in the Dow Industrial Average, was followed by the beginning – some would say the continuation — of the great bull market. This coincided with the Internet revolution, global trade agreements and more Americans taking control of their own retirement through 401(k) investments. All reasons to tune in.

“People were excited to learn about their new investment accounts… and where the money was headed,” said Leckey. “Everyone from brokers to seniors to immigrants who wanted to connect with the American way.”

The growing audience attracted new competitors: Bloomberg, FNN (later gobbled up by CNBC), the now defunct CNNfn and Fox Business Network. It also created the sudden need for TV business correspondents.

Before my entrée into the world of finance, I was a general news reporter at CNN. Many, like myself, learned virtually everything on the job and from devouring The Wall Street Journal.

Cobb was a comparative lit major when he joined FNN. “I could quote Proust and deconstruct post-modernist semiotic texts but had virtually no inkling of what made the markets move or the economy tick,” he said. But he embraced it fully. “I began to understand that every story is a business story in disguise, that money and economics drive virtually everything that gets reported in the daily news flow.”

Fox Business Network correspondent Lauren Simonetti just wanted a foot in the door when she took a production job at CNN. “Frustrated, inexperienced and clueless, I accepted a (low-paying) job at a mega news organization in New York City, and at the time, I tried to ignore the fact that it was in financial news,” said Simonetti. She had a similar epiphany.

It seemed everyone was taking notice. CNBC, which was then housed in a nondescript office building in Fort Lee, NJ, started getting requests for segments from 30 Rock — NBC’s glamorous headquarters across the George Washington Bridge. And corporate America wanted in, too.

Major companies started calling the newsroom, offering their CEOs as guests. “Trading floors in New York started installing live cameras to make it easier to get their industry analysts on our programs,” Cobb remembers. “Brokerages and money managers started buying commercial time in bulk and suddenly, the whole world seemed interested in following the market and economic news.”

CNN also bulked up on business news shows. It started with “Moneyline,” but it didn’t end there. “The big interest grew in the stock market until at one point business news accounted for 25 percent of total CNN programming,” said Kandel.

All that new programming brought increasing criticism, including glorification of the so-called rock star CEO and cheerleading stocks that were bound to fall. But the “greed is good” message that some accused the financial news outlets of touting was also met with no shortage of critical reporting. SABEW’s The Business Journalist covered the rise of business news on television in its October/November 1998 issue.

Many warned for years that skyrocketing dot.com and housing prices were unsustainable. And we doubled down on coverage of Tyco’s infamous $6,000 shower curtain, Martha Stewart’s transformation from domestic goddess to convicted felon and the biggest Ponzi schemer of all time, Bernie Madoff.

Kandel is blunt about coverage ahead of the systemic failures that brought about the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. “The entire financial press missed the boat that brought the international economy to the brink of disaster,” he said.

“The entire financial press missed the boat that brought the international economy to the brink of disaster,” – Myron Kandel

Meanwhile, audience numbers overall were also in decline. This is how it works in financial programming: viewers just aren’t as eager to tune in when all they hear is that their investments are going down.

And this all coincided with another big event: the emergence of social media. CNN correspondent Poppy Harlow was hired specifically as an online reporter for CNNMoney.com in 2008. Many of the stories she reported were web videos that would never be seen in their entirety on TV.

“We sat down for interviews with leaders in the banking industry like Alan Schwartz of Bear Stearns, John Mack, CEO of Morgan Stanley and Hank Greenberg, former CEO of AIG,” said Harlow. CNN only ran sound bites. “On television you often don’t have the air time to run a full, 30-minute interview, but we were able to do that on CNNMoney.com, which made our content unique,” she said.

The bar has been set higher for the new crop of TV business journalists. They’re expected to know more and they’re expected to do more. Actually, let’s just call them multimedia journalists.

“Sharing our work through Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube is extremely important. I am always thinking about the best way to engage viewers so that they will also want to share our work with their friends and family,” said Harlow.

And mobile devices are emerging as a preferred way to share information. “Subscription services may come with mobility,” says Insana. “There are opportunities for more specialization, but more risks that come from fragmenting and commoditizing the information that was long considered premium content on TV.”

That’s a big business story. Watch it on a small screen – perhaps a really, really small screen — near you.

By Becky Bisbee

Maria Bartiromo: Hosts nationally syndicated TV show “The Wall Street Journal Report with Maria Bartiromo” and CNBC’s “Closing Bell with Maria Bartiromo”; in 1995, Bartiromo became the first journalist to report live from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange daily.

Amanda Bennett: Executive Editor/Projects and Investigations  for Bloomberg News.  She was editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer from June 2003, to November 2006, and prior to that was editor of the Herald-Leader in Lexington, Ky.  Wall Street Journal reporter for more than 20 years. A graduate of Harvard College, she held many posts at the paper, including auto reporter in Detroit in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Pentagon and State Department reporter, Beijing correspondent, management editor/reporter, national correspondent and, finally, chief of the Atlanta bureau until 1998, when she moved to The Oregonian.

Margaret Bourke-White: One of Fortune magazine’s first photographers.

Dorothea Brooks: Joined United Press International as financial clerk in 1946 and became its first female business editor in 1969; in 1987, joined PR Newswire, where she became vice president of member services.

Connie Bruck: Senior reporter for The American Lawyer; staff writer at New Yorker; authored “The Predators’ Ball,” about junk-bond king Michael Milken and “Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner.”

Susan C. Faludi: Won Pulitzer Prize in 1991 while at The Wall Street Journal for report on leveraged buyout of Safeway Stores that revealed the human costs of high finance.

Alix M. Freedman: Wrote for BusinessWeek and The New York Times before joining Wall Street Journal in 1984; won several journalism awards for her outstanding investigative work including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for her ongoing coverage of the tobacco industry; won 1993 Loeb Award for story about how one Southern California family dominated the market for cheap handguns used by criminals; won George Polk Award for “Population Bomb.”

Marian Glenn: Her column “Women in Business” appeared in the first issue of Forbes magazine in 1917.

Diana B. Henriques:  Joined Barron’s magazine as a staff writer in 1986; hired away in 1989 by The New York Times; won the Goldsmith Prize and Worth Bingham for 2004 series “Captive Clientele,” how insurance companies, investment firms and lenders have fleeced thousands of soldiers; cited in 2007 by the New York Financial Writers Association for “having made a significant long-term contribution to the advancement of financial journalism”; recipient of SABEW’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2012.

Susan Herera: Anchor for the fledgling Financial News Network in 1981; joined CNBC in December 1989 and co-anchored of its primetime “Business Center.”

Arlene Hershman: Joined (Dun’s) Business Month in 1967, covering Wall Street, economics and corporate finance and wrote a monthly column on investing; became assistant managing editor in 1980 and top editor in 1984, the first woman ever named to the top editorial post of a major business magazine.

Karen Elliott House: Won a Pulitzer Prize in 1984; served as foreign editor of Wall Street Journal from 1984 to 1989.

Wanda Jablonski: Started her career at Journal of Commerce where she served as oil editor; senior editor of Petroleum Week; founded “Petroleum Intelligence Weekly” newsletter, which has been credited with introducing investigative journalism to the oil industry.

Margaret A. Klein: First financial services editor then managing editor for Reuters in North America; in 1977, became first woman president of the New York Financial Writers’ Association.

Eve Krzyzanowski: Joined FNN in 1985 as senior producer after serving as a producer at all three major networks; advanced to vice president of news programming and executive producer of “This Morning’s Business,” a half-hour business news program that was aired on more than 150 U.S. stations; left FNN in 1989; joined BBC Worldwide Americas.

Rieva Lesonsky: Began her tenure with Entrepreneur in 1978 as a research assistant; laid off in 1980 then rehired in 1983 to head research, became editor-in-chief; authored “Get Smart” and co-author of the books “Start Your Own Business,” “Young Millionaires,” and “303 Marketing Tips”; served on the Small Business Administration’s National Advisory Council for six years; honored by the SBA as a Small Business Media Advocate and a Woman in Business Advocate.

Carol J. Loomis: Moved from editor of an in-house publication for Maytag to become research assistant at Fortune magazine in 1954; recipient of Gerald Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award in 1993; Loeb awards in 1974 and 1989; three John Hancock awards; a Newspaper Guild of New York Page One award; and a Hentz Award for Financial Journalism; SABEW Distinguished Achievement Award recipient in 2006.

Gretchen Morgenson: Wrote for Vogue, Money and Forbes magazine; after a two-year stint at Worth as executive editor, she was press secretary for Steve Forbes during his unsuccessful bid for president; returned to Forbes before joining The New York Times in 1998 as an assistant business and financial editor; won Pulitzer and Loeb awards in 2002 for writing on the inherent conflicts of interests between financial analysts and their firms; member of the team that won the Loeb for 1998 articles on the near collapse of Long Term Capital Management; author of “Forbes Great Minds of Business,” and co-author of “The New York Times Dictionary of Money and Investing” and “The Woman’s Guide to the Stock Market.”

Linda O’Bryon: Co-founded and anchored of the “Nightly Business Report” on Miami’s WPBT2 in 1979; eventually reached 275 PBS stations; recipient of SABEW’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2004.

Sylvia F. Porter: Began writing personal finance column, “S.F. Porter Says,” in 1936 for The New York Post; personal finance column “Your Money” was syndicated by The Los Angeles Times and appeared in 450 newspapers worldwide; wrote more than 30 books, including “Sylvia Porter’s Money Book” in 1971 which sold more than 1 million copies.

Sally Powell: First woman senior editor at BusinessWeek, supervised four sections of the weekly: Labor, Social Issues, Transportation and Media & Entertainment, book reviews.

Jane Bryant Quinn: Syndicated personal finance columnist for Newsweek, business correspondent for TV news organizations; wrote “Everybody’s Money Book,” “Making the Most of Your Money,” “A Hole in the Market”; received John Hancock Award in 1992; Loeb Award in 1995, Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, an Emmy, three National Press Club awards for consumer journalism and two National Headline awards; named by World Almanac as one of the 25 most influential women in the United States.

Clare M. Reckert: The New York Times’ first female financial writer and among the first women to break into business reporting; began her career in 1937 as secretary for the financial desk, writing using the byline of C.M. Reckert; covered disagreement between Howard Hughes and TWA, and Ford Motor’s first earnings report when the automaker went public; retired at age 78 from the Times in 1981.

Eileen Shanahan: Covered price and wage controls imposed during the Korean War for newsletter; first woman reporter in The New York Times’ Washington Bureau who’d been hired for any assignment other than coverage of the First Ladies; covered the Securities and Exchange Commission and major tax legislation; joined other Times’ women in a 1974 class action discrimination case against the newspaper, which was settled out-of-court in 1977; in 1977 joined Carter administration as the top public affairs officer for the old Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services); received University of Missouri Medal and the Colby College Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for lifetime achievements.

Marty Steffens: First SABEW chair in business journalism at the University of Missouri; assumed the chair in 2002, after a 30-year career in newspapers, including executive editor of the San Francisco Examiner, and earlier the Press & Sun Bulletin in Binghamton, N.Y.; Steffens’ two-year economic project in Binghamton, which inspired citizens to take a proactive role in planning the community’s economic future, has been studied by academics around the world; She was an editor at the Los Angeles Times business desk; held other editing and reporting roles at the Minneapolis Star, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Orange County Register, Dayton Daily News and Evansville (Ind.) Courier.

Alecia Swasy: Wrote for Wall Street Journal in Atlanta and Pittsburgh bureaus; deputy managing editor at Virginian Pilot; business editor and assistant managing editor at St. Petersburg Times; assistant managing editor of Dow Jones Newswires; authored “Changing Focus: Kodak and the Battle to Save a Great American Company” and “Soap Opera: The Inside Story about Procter & Gamble.”

Kara Swisher: Worked for The Washington Post; started covering tech industry for The Wall Street Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 1997; co-produces and co-hosts D: All Things Digital, a major high-tech conference; author of “Aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Netheads and Made Millions in the War for the Web” in 1998 and the sequel, “There Must Be a Pony in Here Somewhere: The AOL Time Warner Debacle and the Quest for a Digital Future” in 2003.

Ida M. Tarbell: The original investigative business journalist. Her 19-part expose of Standard Oil for McClure’s broke up that company; authored 10-volume “The Nationalizing of Business”; “All in a Day’s Work,” her autobiography in 1939; “The Early Life of Abraham Lincoln,” with W.J. McCan Davis; “Life of Abraham Lincoln” in 1900; her “History of the Standard Oil Company” was chosen by New York University as one of the top 100 works of journalism in the 20th century.

Alena Wels: Authority on international monetary and banking issues at Journal of Commerce, where she started in 1970; eventually became paper’s chief editorial writer.

Betty Wong: After five years at Wall Street Journal, joined Reuters in 1989 as rewrite editor, left 22 years later as global managing editor, overseeing editorial operations of 3,000 journalists working in 200 news bureaus around the world.

Karen Zehring: Founded, published and initially edited Corporate Finance magazine.

SOURCES: TJFR Group 100 business news luminaries of the century, 2000; SABEW, The Business Journalist archives, author websites.

Related:
Women Play Major Role in SABEW and Business Journalism
Women who Served as SABEW President
Dorothea Brooks 1923-present. United Press International