Gary Klott

By Stacey Northup

The memory of Gary Klott continues to have great influence on the Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ code of ethics. Throughout the ethically challenging times in the world of business journalism, Klott educated members and encouraged them to follow a strong code.

Klott was born on Oct. 4, 1949, in Albany Park, Ill., where he was raised.  After graduating from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1971 with a degree in economics, Klott served as a lieutenant in the Navy in Vietnam.  Until 1974, he was a communications officer aboard the USS Kitty Hawk, according to his obituary in The New York Times.

Following his time in the Navy, Klott began his journalism career.  He spent a little time as a television reporter at a small station in Nebraska but quickly moved on to start a small paper in Kankakee, Illinois.  Then, he went to work at the Ft. Lauderdale Sun Sentinel and soon after, Klott became a tax reporter for The Times, covering tax law changes.

This was quickly followed by a position as a columnist for the newspaper writing the “Tax Watch” column.  Klott then left his job at The Times to write three different syndicated personal finance and tax columns, including one syndicated by Tribune Media Services, in the late 1980s.  He would write on tax laws, real estate and personal finance for these columns.

With such great knowledge on the topic of taxes, Klott founded the website TaxPlanet.com in 1999, offering information about personal taxes.  The advice was read by both individuals and tax professionals.  The website garnered dozens of national awards and Money magazine rated it one of the top 50 financial websites, according to Klott’s obituary in The Los Angeles Times.

Klott also authored three books.  “The New York Times Complete Guide to the New Tax Law,” “The New York Times Complete Guide to Personal Investing” and “The Complete Financial Guide to the 1990s” all stemmed from his knowledge and expertise of taxes and personal finance.

“Gary was a very gifted writer,” said Randall D. Smith, former president of SABEW.  “Not only a gifted writer, but he understood some of the most complex things and put them in the simplest terms.  When you read his stories and columns, you understood what he was trying to get across.” In the February/March 2001 issue of The Business Journalist, Klott offered advice to other business journalists on how to cover taxes.

Klott was active in SABEW for many years, and aggressively championed elevated standards of ethical behavior, particularly serving as the president of SABEW in 1994-1995. “We don’t think about taxes or personal finance with Gary, but mostly ethics,” said Smith.  “The reason why is because Gary led a lot of discussions.  He kept us morally straight during a challenging time in the ’90s when there was a lot of money floating around and great temptation for business journalists.”

Klott’s wife, Sandra Duerr, executive editor of The San Luis Obispo Tribune, had similar thoughts: “Gary was best known for his coverage of tax issues, development of the critically acclaimed TaxPlanet.com and pushing SABEW to strengthen its ethics code in 1991 to address advertising encroachment to retain the integrity of business journalism.”

From 1991-1992, Klott chaired SABEW’s Futures Committee.  A majority of this committee’s recommendations received unanimous support from the board at a November 1991 meeting.

Duerr said these recommendations included, “distinguished achievement awards (an annual writing contest and separate awards for lifetime achievement in business journalism); a 24-hour jobs hotline; an electronic bulletin board; a bi-monthly president’s newsletter; a stepped-up membership campaign; an outreach program for minority journalists; and a greater focus on ethics.”

On Aug. 10, 2002, Klott died of a massive heart attack in his home in San Luis Obispo.  He was 52.

Due to Klott’s strong sense of ethics that guided every step of his career, Duerr, along with Klott’s brothers David and Richard Klott, created the Gary L. Klott Business Journalism Ethics Fund after his death.  This fund is committed to championing the cause of ethics in business journalism.

“His influence broadened when he began working for The New York Times and continued on his own,” said Duerr, who was also a SABEW president.  “That’s due not only to the depth and quality of his work nationwide on taxes and personal finance, but also his leadership with SABEW and the news industry on ethics.”

“Gary accomplished a great deal in his relatively short life,” said Duerr.

SABEW’s 11th business journalism ethics symposium held in Klott’s name will be held in 2013.  The seminar focuses on topical, relevant issues every year and allows discussion for how people would response in various ethical situations.

Stacey Northup is a native of Raleigh, N.C. ,and a Journalism and Mass Communication major in the Class of 2013 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Chris Welles

By Rachel Butt

Chris Welles never stopped shaking up his work life.

From the 1960s to the mid 1980s, the award-winning business journalist pulled back the curtain on financial shenanigans, headed the Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program at Columbia University (now the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism), and authored a book on the oil shale industry, “The Elusive Bonanza,” and a book on Wall Street after fixed commission ended, “The Last Days of the Club.”

The Princeton graduate started as a fact-checker in the entertainment department at Life magazine, and was promoted to be a writer after he wrote a story about a real estate developer.

In 1968, Welles wrote an expose story on the oil industry’s failure to develop oil shale reserves, which was killed by the management of Life under pressure from the industry.

Welles was fired within months after he became the magazine’s business editor when he sold the oil shale story to Harper’s Magazine, which sparked much controversy.

“His oil shale story was a huge business topic at that time” and is once again in the news due to the growth and controversy over fracking, said Amey Stone, MSN Money’s deputy managing editor and a former colleague of Welles at BusinessWeek (now Bloomberg Businessweek).  “He really was very much able to predict the huge trend.”

Welles continued to wrestle with the domestic oil industry after he was made the director of the Bagehot Program in 1977. During his eight-year tenure, Welles had to balance on a tightrope between fundraising and reporting.

In his early freelance stories, Welles had written critically about the oil industry, and produced numerous articles for magazines such as Esquire, New York and Institutional Investor.

As soon as his appointment was announced, Mobil Oil withdrew its support of $50,000 to the academic fellowship.

“I know that’s not easy,” said Steven Shepard, a former editor of BusinessWeek and the first director of the Bagehot program. “There were times when we took fewer fellows… despite this, the program survived.”

Welles ran the Bagehot program and taught business journalism to mid-career journalists until 1985.

William Glasgall, a Knight-Bagehot Fellow, said he appreciated the flexibility of the curriculum and Welles’ tough examination of businesses.

“Chris just embodied the best of journalism, which is to be very careful with your reporting, be persistent, and never take ‘no’ for answer,” said Glasgall, managing editor for states and municipalities at Bloomberg News.

Welles did not stay as a professor for long because his heart was in journalism, and he felt a conflict between his role as a journalist and his role as fundraiser, his wife, Nancy said.

He joined BusinessWeek in January 1986, bringing a good mixture of scholarly disposition and journalist disposition to the magazine.

Joseph Weber, who knew Welles as a teacher at Columbia and later as an editor at BusinesWeek, said Welles had a take-no-prisoner’s attitude toward bigwig economists or CEOs.

He remembers how Welles stood up against Donald Trump when the real estate magnate demanded  more favorable coverage of the casino operation’s bankruptcy in the early 1990s.

 “Chris didn’t offer any response to Trump’s deal-making suggestions,” Weber said. “He was very disciplined about it, and he was very fair-minded when we put the story together.”

In hope of expanding Welles’ effectiveness, Shepard eventually promoted him to be an editor

“There’s a saying that we get the best on Welles for every two months, but his influence will be multiplied if he served as an editor,” Shepard said.

As a senior editor in the finance department, Welles tackled complex issues in Wall Street and the banking industry amidst the eruption of insider trading scandals.

While the magazine had extensive coverage of the scandal involving junk-bond king Michael Milken, Welles was exhaustive in covering BusinessWeek’s own insider-trading scandal. “It was an indication of my trust for Chris to go to the bottom with it,” Shepard said.

As a journalist, Welles is best known for the clarity and thoroughness of his reporting. Seymour Zucker, senior editor of BusinessWeek, said, “The truth was primarily in his way of looking at things.”

Welles also worked for The Saturday Evening Post and The Los Angeles Times. He received numerous awards, including the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award, a National Magazine Award, and the 1997 Distinguished Achievement Award of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Although Welles enjoyed the intensity of highs from reporting, he took an early retirement with BusinessWeek and decided to pursue photography. Three months after he retired, he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.

His approach to journalism – best captured with the phrases “Question Authority” and “No reprint, no losses”– was reprinted on small, hand-held fans at his memorial service in July 2010. He was 72 and lived in Brooklyn.

Rachel Butt is a native of Hong Kong and a business journalism major in the Class of 2013 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

By Shelley Watkins

James (Jim) Michaels’ contributions to journalism have been largely forgotten by today’s writers, but to his contemporaries and those at Forbes who worked with him, Michaels was a legend who transformed the world of business journalism.

Michaels was known for trying to make a “business critic” out of journalists. He felt that an article should be told like a story, one that captivates and keeps the readers’ attention. He capitalized on the idea that journalism was like show business. He believed this to be done by creating a unified piece.

Michaels expected his writers to start with an anecdote and end with that same anecdotal reference. If the story was written correctly there could be a reference dropped perfectly in the middle.

Michaels was born in Buffalo, N.Y., on June 17, 1921. During his twenties, Michaels attended Culver Military Academy in Indiana and later graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor’s degree in economics. At the outbreak of World War II, Michaels joined the military.

By 1943 a young Michaels was accepted into the American Field Service and sent to Bombay, India. Upon being relieved from his war duties, Michaels stayed in India and refined his writing skills while working for the United Press wire service.

Michaels’ distinctive writing career truly began in the 1940s with his time in India. At that time, Michaels was working in India as a political journalist and began to write some of the biggest stories of his life. In 1948, Michaels broke the story of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, setting his place as a forerunner in the changes that were to come in journalism.

Constantly in the center of India’s political turmoil, Michaels became known for his investigative stories, which would later be a driving force in transforming the identity of Forbes magazine.

Michaels was editor at Forbes from 1961 to 1999. In 1954, when Forbes hired Michaels, business journalism was said to be “a place where publications dumped their drunks and burned-out sportswriters.”

Michaels’ unique approach to editing and column writing changed the image of business journalism from one that was boring, dull, and unreadable to one that told who was doing well, who wasn’t, and why. Michaels transformed business journalism into a fascinating stage of drama, triumphs, and tragedies.

Former senior editor Dick Stern remembers Michaels. “He was by far the brightest editor, had tremendous historical understanding of the markets, and was an absolutely brilliant wordsmith,” said Stern. “He would make articles pop off the page.”

Two of the most remembered concepts that Michaels strived to embed in his writers were the ideas of being original and of being concise. Michaels’ main concern was the reader. He did not want to bore his readers with useless information. He wanted to give his readers exciting stories that were straightforward and focused on the relevant points.

Michaels expected great work from his employees. Former Forbes writer Gretchen Morgensen described Michaels as being demanding in what he expected from his articles. “Either you had to be first or you had to be completely different from other reporters,” she said. “And God help you if you weren’t coming up with what he wanted.”

Around the Forbes office, Michaels’ harsh personality struck fear in most people’s hearts.

“Many people were afraid of him, but there was a cadre of people who were willing to go in and fight with him,” remembered Stern.

Though Michaels was a tough critique, the people who worked for him learned effective ways of writing.

Stern described his time with Michaels when he explained, “Thirteen years at Forbes working with Michaels was like a master’s or doctoral course in how to understand business and do business journalism.”

Fortune senior editor at large Allan Sloan felt that Michaels was a reason for why he is a successful writer today. “Forbes was a great place to work for someone who was a self-starter,” said Sloan.

Michaels would drive his writers to seek out original, inventive stories that had yet to be covered by other publications.

“He didn’t teach; he led,” remarked Sloan.

Michaels took business journalism out of the shadows and transformed it into one of the leading topics of today’s society. Though the general population may not revere him, his legacies will remain vital in how business journalism continues to grow and flourish throughout the world.

“Forbes in the heyday was known for celebrating business,” said Stern. “It wasn’t just a cheerleader, it was accountable journalism.”

Shelley Watkins is a senior public relations major at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Born and raised in Atlanta, Ga., she hopes to someday return to the Peach state to work for a PR firm.