By Melvin Backman

There was a time before John Brooks started writing business pieces when the subject was the purview of suits in the C-suite. Then, it became front-page news, and the general public took greater interest in how money is made in America.

John Brooks isn’t the main reason this change took place, but his writings exist deep in its intellectual core.

He wrote for the rarified pages of the New Yorker, spilling ink that was unlikely to stain the hands of a lay worker, but he was still a pioneer, serving as a guide for later business journalists seeking to combine literary flourish with strong analysis.

A member of Princeton University’s Class of 1942, Brooks started his career at Time magazine as a contributing editor after a short stint in the Army during World War II. Two years later, he began writing for the New Yorker and didn’t look back.

During his time at the prestigious magazine, Brooks brought to life for readers the culture of Wall Street, all of its excesses and deficiencies included. He also published a few books: “The Go-Go Years,” published in 1973, is his most famous, but he also penned 10 other books, including a few novels and a history of Ford Motor Co.’s failed Edsel line.

Beside the casino nature of American finance, “The Go-Go Years” shed light on the way things were done on the Street during the high-flying 1960s. For instance: women were often almost completely barred from the lunch clubs and restaurants that served high-flying traders taking a break from the market.

His eloquent prose makes the situation plaint: “Even in summer, the air lied heavy, dank and sunless,” excerpted Maggie Mahar in her 2004 Wall Street book, “Bull!” “Pretty women seemed flesh without magic.”

Joe Nocera, the New York Times columnist, recalls picking up Brooks’s writing in the mid-1980s, a few years after he had written his first business article in 1982. By the end of the decade, it was obvious how deeply Brooks had influenced Nocera. A 1988 Esquire article about the Wall Street culture that lead to the “Black Monday” stock market crash a year earlier was titled “The Ga-Ga Years,” a tribute to one of Nocera’s favorite books.

Although he doesn’t believe that every modern financial writer taps a keyboard with Brooks’ prose ringing in her ears, Nocera says that Brooks brought panache to a subject that had previously seemed so staid.

“We now live in an era where business has become a standard subject for reporting,” he said, noting that Brooks stood out to him early in his journalism career.

Eventually, business news would sneak out of office buildings like a young employee on a summer Friday and into the business sections of metro newspapers. Nocera denied that Brooks was responsible for this.

“That would have happened with or without John Brooks,” he said.

Still, the man was a pioneer, boldly writing where few had dragged a quill.

“He was the very, very rare writer of his time who was writing serious articles for a non-business publication and a non-business audience,” Nocera said.

Outside of the newsroom, Brooks approached life with as much intellectual rigor and discipline as he his writing had flourish.

His stepson Seamus Mahoney, a Minneapolis lawyer whose mother, Barbara Mahoney Brooks, began seeing John Brooks when Mahoney was 16 before marrying four years later, was impressed that Brooks managed a strict schedule every day: writing from breakfast ‘til noon, a cocktail and lunch, followed by an afternoon of reading.

“I suppose that’s what writers need to do, have the self-discipline,” he said.

He also recalls that Brooks was a man with an incredibly sharp wit.

“He did not suffer fools gladly, and he could be a little cranky as a person, but he was fun to have dinner with because he was very knowledgeable,” he said.

The dinners he shared with Brooks in his Barrow Street home in New York City were adult, intellectually stimulating affairs that were sometimes followed by friendly cigars and where talking points always had to be rock solid.

“If you said something that wasn’t well-grounded, he would call you on it, because he probably knew the facts,” said Mahoney.

Tragedy struck when Brooks suffered a stroke in his twilight years, which devastated his mind and relegated him to a nursing home. Mahoney recalls the bitter irony:

“All of a sudden, this guy I admired for his intelligence and his acumen,” he said. “To see him deflated, and lost, was a sort of strange feeling.”

“It was a tragic end to a bright life,” he continued. “He would have rather have died outright than to have lived for a few years and not use his brain.”

Melvin Backman, from North Charleston, S.C., is a senior journalism major at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has interned with the finance team at Reuters and will be with the Wall Street Journal’s Money and Investing section this summer.

Jerry Flint

By Nicholas Sanford

Jerry Flint and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, publisher of The New York Times , stood next to each other as they looked at the newsroom and Flint said his goodbyes.

Sulzberger looked to Flint and said, “Most of these guys I’d like to fire. You – you I’d like to keep.” Kate McLeod, Flint’s wife of 22 years, recalls this moment as being special to Flint.

Described as “a character,” “an unstoppable force” and “a straight-shooter,” Flint covered the automotive industry for more than a half a century wearing a variety of outfits ranging from the fedoras and capes he wore to news conferences to the lab coats and clipboards he used to sneak into automotive design labs with Jim Dunne, a former spy photographer for Popular Mechanics.

Throughout his career, he reported on everything from politics to urban life and of course the automotive industry. He won several awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, being named one of the 100 most prominent business reporters of the 20th century by TJFR Group and MasterCard International and was even selected as one of 40 finalists to be the first journalist in space before NASA canceled the program.

However, as most people closest to him recall, little of this mattered to Flint. “He didn’t care about awards or anything,” McLeod said. “He was amazed that he was successful. He just kept his head down and did his work.”

Flint was born Yehudi Meyer Flint in Detroit, Mich., on June 20, 1931. He attended Wayne University where he studied journalism.

Flint joined the ranks of professional journalists after serving three years in the U.S. Army in a European intelligence unit. In 1956, he started at The Wall Street Journal where he was a staff writer covering business and finance for 11 years.

He then moved to The New York Times in 1967 as its Detroit bureau chief. While there, he covered the automotive industry and 1967 Detroit riots and famously broke the news of George Romney’s “brainwashing” gaffe during his 1968 presidential campaign. In 1973, Flint moved to New York for The New York Times working the national news, then as a financial editor, then the national labor writer.

Finally, he joined Forbes in 1979 as its Washington bureau chief. During his time as Forbes, he was also assistant managing editor and senior writer at the Forbes headquarters in New York. After retiring in 1996, he immediately returned to Forbes to become a columnist.

At his roots Jerry Flint was a writer, said Joe Flint, one of Jerry Flint’s four sons. Even after moving up the corporate masthead to the number two position at Forbes, Jerry Flint chose to move back down. “The higher up he went and the more he was taken away from reporting, the less happy he was,” Joe Flint said.

After years of covering the automotive industry, Jerry Flint knew the industry better than anyone else. He had an encyclopedic knowledge as some referred to it. He could see trends and understand the future of the automotive companies better than anyone else. “You’re dealing with two types of people in PR: the car people and the business people,” Baron Bates, then vice president of public relations for Chrysler, said. “Jerry was the most knowledgeable editor about business.”

Even when no one else believed what he was saying, Flint stuck by his words. For example, 30 years ago when Chrysler was on the brink of collapse, no one but Lee Iacocca, then-CEO of Chrysler, and Flint believe it could be saved, and Flint wrote an article in Forbes detailing his reasoning. The management of the magazine, so skeptical of his article, printed a disclaimer at the beginning of the article explaining the opinion represented in the article was of Flint’s and Flint’s alone.

As we all know today, Flint was right.

Despite his distinction and immense knowledge, Flint wasn’t egotistical and was always willing to pass down wisdom to younger colleagues, Joe Flint said. It was these characteristics that got him the title of “the dean of automotive journalism.” He also had a strong work ethic, a skill lacking among many journalists today, Joe Flint said.

He did the proper research, talked to the right people, and wrote his articles; he wasn’t just reading other journalists work and writing an opinion based off of that.

Jerry Flint’s contributions to journalism are matched only by the ways he influenced the automotive industry.

McLeod said Flint, although humorous and kind-hearted, had no interested in being friends with the people he covered. “They were terrified of him and hated him – which is the best thing you can be as a journalist,” she said. “But he was also greatly respected not only in the automotive world, but also by his peers. When I founded a scholarship in his name, they all sent checks.”

Flint was never afraid to tell the automotive executives what he felt. He was always honest and forthright with the companies and expected the same from them. McLeod said it was hard to anger Flint or cause him to hold a grudge, but that he hated when an executive would lie or spin numbers. He was also not afraid to call out an executive at the podium during a conference if that happened.

It was during a meeting that Flint gave the speech that would travel the world seven times over and was read by every automotive executive and journalist. He was invited to General Motors Co. in 2001 to give a speech to the company’s engineers and technicians. Unlike most speaking engagements, his airfare, accommodations, and meals were not paid for.

When McLeod asked Flint why he was willing to pay for everything, he responded simply, “I have to do this. I have been invited into the inner sanctum.” The speech, heard by dozens of employees, lambasted the company, its strategy and its executives. He said, “You are badly led, with an organization that just doesn’t work.”

It was this tenacity and voraciousness that made so many executives respect him. It was not uncommon for executives to call Flint asking for advice about how their products compared to competitors, said Steve Kichen, assistant managing editor when Flint was at Forbes. One time during a news conference, Iacocca started a sentence with “As Jerry Flint would say…” and Flint’s response was, “Sometimes I quote Lee, and sometimes Lee quotes me.”

Even though these companies were also the advertisers that provided vital revenue to the newspapers and magazines he worked at, he never held back a criticism. “He had a soft spot in his heart for the home team- the Americans,” Kichen said. “He was always pushing them to upgrade their product because they were so far behind foreign competitors.”

As he got older, Flint faced heart and other health issues, which resulted in a bypass surgery. However, nothing was able to slow Flint down. Throughout his retirement and until the day he passed away, he was writing six columns a month for various publications.

“Jerry didn’t know what it meant to stop,” Kichen said. “I was amazed how often he would get on a plane and go out to Detroit for a car preview at his age.”

“Detroit is like going into the military. Most come and go,” Bates said. “But Jerry stayed. He was one of the unforgettable characters in a very, very good way.”

Flint loved books and a good story. One of his favorites was “What Makes Sammy Run?” by Budd Schulberg. On McLeod and Flint’s first date, he gave her a business card and on the back he wrote a quote from that book. “‘Work hard, and, if you can’t work hard, be smart; and, if you can’t be smart, be loud.’ Jerry was all three,” McLeod said.

Flint passed away on Aug.7, 2010, in Hudson, N.Y., due to a stroke.

Nicholas Sanford is a native of Sherrills Ford, N.C., and a business journalism major in the Class of 2014 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is also a multimedia journalist at Reese News Labs.

Sylvia Porter

By Kathleen Hayes

Financial reporter and columnist Sylvia Porter was groundbreaking. She was the first female in the field, and her approach to financial reporting and advising broke business jargon into simple terms. She devoted herself to helping middle class Americans understand the changing economy and save and invest wisely.

Porter was born on June 18, 1913, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family in Patchogue, N.Y. Her father was a physician, but when he died when Porter was 12 years old, her mother started a business making and selling hats.

In the late 1920s, Porter’s mother lost all her $30,000 in savings in the stock market. When the market crashed in 1929, Porter switched her major at Hunter College from history and English literature to economics. Porter’s successor in writing the personal finance column, Kathy Kristof, said Porter wanted “to understand what was making her life — and the lives of everyone around her — so miserable.”

In 1932, Porter married a bank employee, Reed R. Porter, and graduated from Hunter College magna cum laude.

Immediately after, Porter started working at a Wall Street small investment counseling firm to learn about currency fluctuations, the stock and bond markets, and business cycles. At the same time, she got her MBA from New York University.

In 1934, Porter began her career in financial writing. She wrote a thrice-weekly financial column called “S.F. Porter Says” for the New York Post and used the byline S.F. Porter to conceal her gender. The Post told her to do so, as men dominated the field, and the paper feared a female writer would not be taken seriously. However, Forbes investment writer John Wasik said that Porter revolutionized the industry; “Prior to Porter, financial columns were mostly men writing about stocks they liked,” he said.

One of Porter’s competitors, Jane Bryant Quinn, said ironically she and Porter ended up defining personal finance as women’s work. Quinn said, “The upside of this was that it attracted female readers – women who probably hadn’t had much to do with their own personal finances. As the divorce rate grew, and as more women entered the workforce and had to make more decisions on their own, the presence of female voices was especially helpful.”

By 1938, Porter became the Post’s financial editor, yet it was not until 1942 that most of Porter’s readers realized their trusted financial guide was a woman, let alone a 29 year-old. Once this news was out, Porter used it as an asset and decided to become a broadcaster on New York’s News Talk Radio WJZ “What Can I Do?” program.

She quickly climbed the ladder to success, because she informed and advised in a way that was easily understandable, and she was not afraid to expose financial corruption in government and businesses.

Porter was an activist as well as a writer; she boldly criticized government officials for their fiscal policies but also advised several U.S. presidents. Porter’s personal finance column reached more than 40 million readers at its peak and was syndicated by The Los Angeles Times and 450 other newspapers around the world.

Porter also began a column in The American Banker on the United States government securities market and then started an information service on government bonds. She was a leader in the start of the U.S. Savings Bond program and bought bonds herself. Kristof said that Porter “amassed a fortune the old fashioned way — getting rich slowly through consistent savings and hard work.” Porter wanted America to be a level playing field but also urged individuals to take personal responsibility.

Additionally, Porter wrote all kinds of books, primarily on taxes, saving, and investing. In 1939, Porter published “How To Make Money in Government Bonds,” which was the first book to ever cover all government finance and explain it in simple terms. Seeing the need for more streamlined news, Porter wrote “If War Comes to the American Home” to explain the country’s national defense.

Beginning in 1960, Porter published “Sylvia Porter’s Income Tax Guide,” which she published annually until she died more than 30 years later.

In 1961, Porter gave a speech titled “Business News for Everyone” to the Associated Press Managing Editors Association in which she explained her finding that people want to read business news, if they could understand it. She said, “We in America are living through the most profound, glorious income revolution in all history, which means that for the first time the vast majority of Americans are earning enough income to be acutely interested in reading in simple language about trends in jobs, paychecks, living costs, and taxes.”

In 1978, after 43 years with the Post, Porter began working for New York Daily News. Porter also wrote monthly articles for the Ladies’ Home Journal from 1965 to 1982.

In 1975, she published one of her most successful books, “Sylvia Porter’s Money Book: How to Earn It, Spend it, Save It, Invest It, Borrow It and Use It to Better Your Life.”

Dr. Tracy Lucht of Iowa State University’s Greenlee School of Journalism and Communication is writing a biography of Porter and said Porter “showed that the middle class had real economic power, as the U.S. became a consumer society. Porter was an absolute hawk on inflation and persuaded many people to look for bargains on everything, from life insurance to the food they put on the table.”

Keeping up with the changing times, Porter also endorsed and attached her name to a series of personal finance software packages for home computers in the 1980s.

Porter’s last two books were “Your Finances in the 1990s” and “Planning Your Retirement,” which she worked on in her final months before she died on June 5, 1991.

Porter received 14 honorary doctoral degrees for her leadership in financial journalism and advising.

Kathleen Hayes is a business journalism major and Morehead-Cain scholar from Wilmington, N.C. Hayes has interned and studied in Tanzania, India, and Australia and is pursuing a career in consulting. Her interests include tennis and education in developing countries.