Mike Kandel

Mike was a financial reporter for The New York Times; a foreign correspondent and financial editor for the New York Herald Tribune; business editor of the Washington Star and the New York Post, and founding financial editor and economic commentator for CNN. He served twice as president of SABEW.

I was financial editor of the New York Post in 1979, having been recruited for that job by Rupert Murdoch soon after he bought the paper at the end of 1976 with the promise that he would publish a “respectable” tabloid.

For a while, we did just that. It had some good ingredients — a terrific sports section, outstanding cultural reporting and criticism, a still-liberal editorial page under the legendary Jimmy Wechsler, and, if I may say so immodestly, a superior financial section. It also had an innovative brand of gossip titled Page Six.

But then the paper’s upfront news pages and headlines began getting more and more sensational, and so I began thinking of leaving, even though Rupert was paying me a good salary, in addition to a hefty fee for the syndicated column I wrote with my old friend and former New York Herald Tribune colleague Phillip Greer.

Out of the blue, a friend asked me to have lunch with him and a fellow who was putting together an all-news television network for someone named Ted Turner. I agreed as a favor to my friend and met the first president of what was to become Cable News Network, a news visionary named Reese Schonfeld.

If you’re going to do all that TV, I told him, why not devote at least some of it to covering business news, which I described as the real wasteland of television news. We’re going to do just that, with a half-hour program at 7 p.m., he responded. Great, I said, thanked him for lunch and went my way. The tube was not ever in my thoughts, what with my Brooklyn accent and a face more suited to radio than even a small TV screen.

But then Schonfeld called me and asked me if I’d be interested in the job of financial editor and on-air guru for the new network. I said I’d consider it. Then he added, just take a “screen test.” That’s it, I thought, figuring such a test would be my undoing. But I showed up at the appointed place, a nondescript office in midtown Manhattan, where I was seated at a desk with a
rudimentary camera pointed at me from the doorway, and I was asked to talk about myself, read something and interview the guy who was conducting the test.

After listing my various jobs in journalism, I read from a carbon copy of the column I had just delivered to my syndicate and proceeded to ask the interviewer such questions as, “Who’s this guy Ted Turner?” and “Where is he getting the money for this new network.” Then I left, and on the way out and then down the street bumped into two old friends, both of them excellent financial journalists and younger and better-looking than me. Obviously, they were on the same mission, and so I wrote off that idea.

A few days later, however, Schonfeld called me and said he had received a tape of the test and it was fine. “You’re kidding,” I said skeptically. “Yes it was,” he replied. “What you don’t have in the television graces, you make up for credibility, knowledgeability and sincerity.”

So I took the job and started in January 1980. I figured I was too busy planning for the , network’s start that June to attend the SABEW convention in Dallas in May, but Schonfeld urged me to go, and I went.

The folks running the meeting gave me a segment. While I was in the midst of discussing what we were going to do with a full half-hour of business news for the first time in the history of network television — including my own on-air role — a loud voice boomed out from the audience. It was from my friend Elizabeth Yamashita, a crusty professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University.

“YOU’RE going to be on television?” she exclaimed somewhat incredulously, amid a chorus of laughter.

Those words still resonated to me during the 25 years I then spent at CNN and its various sister networks. If I ever felt I might be getting a swelled head, all I needed to do was to remember Elizabeth’s words, “YOU’RE going to be on television?” and that always got me down to earth.

So SABEW deserves part of the credit.

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.

Gretchen Morgenson

Born on Jan. 2, 1956, in Bellefonte, Pa. She spent three years on Wall Street and has been a financial reporter since 1984. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her “trenchant and incisive” reporting on Wall Street. She writes the Fair Game column for The New York Times and is co-author of the best-selling book on the financial crisis, “Reckless Endangerment: How Outsized Ambition, Greed and Corruption Created the Worst Financial Crisis of Our Time.”

One of the questions I almost always get when I address an audience on the 2008 financial crisis is this: Why didn’t the financial press sound more of a warning about the dangers that were lurking in the economy in general and housing in particular?

It is a frustrating question not only because it is a criticism of our work but also because it is accurate to some degree. Few financial reporters did enough to question the conventional wisdom leading up to the crisis — that housing prices never go down nationwide, that Wall Street’s newfangled securities defused rather than increased risk, that big banks could monitor themselves without help from regulators.

But more important, this audience question provides business reporters with clarity on what it is that readers want. Indeed, it confirms that readers seek groundbreaking and insightful reporting and analysis on events or actions that affect the economy, their investments and their pocketbooks.

And, as the world of finance and business becomes increasingly complex — who could have fathomed a decade ago the creation of collateralized debt obligations embedded with synthetic mortgage instruments? — penetrating analyses and clear explanatory writing become even more important.

Put another way, readers don’t want business reporters to be court stenographers, recording without question the utterances of chief executives and their public relations operatives. They don’t want rewritten press releases or fawning profiles. Readers want articles that can help them understand the complexities that Wall Street creates, that shine a light on the dark corners where questionable business practices often flourish.

Such reporting is not easy. It attracts criticism from powerful people who prefer to operate amid the fog. It induces attacks from those interested in maintaining the status quo. It generates angry calls to editors and publishers.

As a result, it could not be more important.

Providing readers with genuine insights about complex matters requires a dedication to the truth and a spine of steel, of course, not only from reporters, but also from their editors.

Only then will readers stop wondering: “Hey, where was the financial media when we needed them?”

Allan Sloan

Born 1944, a business writer for more than 40 years, joined Fortune as a senior editor at large in 2007. For the previous 12 years, he was Newsweek’s Wall Street editor. He has won a record seven Loeb Awards, receiving Loebs in four different categories in four different decades for five different employers. In 2001, he received the SABEW Distinguished Achievement Award. He’s a graduate of Brooklyn College and has a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He and his wife live in New Jersey, and have three grown children

You can get a lot out of being a journalist without making it your life’s work. That’s why, to the occasional discomfort of parents who are worried about their kids’ ability to make a living, I encourage young people who are interested in journalism to take a shot at it.

Why? Because even though the economics of journalism are dreadful these days, you can get a lot out of being a journalist, even if you decide not to make it your life’s work.

I’ve had a wonderful 40-plus years doing what I define as journalism: finding out stuff that it’s good for people to know and telling them about it in a way that engages them, using language that they don’t have to be insiders or jargon freaks to understand.

But you don’t have to spend your entire career as a journalist to get something — quite a lot, actually — out of it. And who knows? Maybe you’ll like it, and figure out how to make a decent living at it. I did; there’s no reason you shouldn’t be able to.

Let me show you why a few years as a journalist can be good for you — and good for your future prospects — even if you decide to do something less déclassé, such as teaching or law or business.

One of the things you learn as a journalist, if you’re any good at it at all, is how to come to the point. When you sit down at a keyboard or microphone, you need to tell your audience quickly what you’re trying to do, or you won’t have an audience. (And you won’t have a job for very long, either.)

You don’t realize what a useful skill that is until you’ve spent as much time as I have dealing with people who don’t know what point they’re trying to make, or don’t know how to make the points that they do have.

You learn to write what I call “a language approaching English” in a way that normal people can understand. This is a rare skill. You learn to write in the active voice. To keep sentences short and direct. To avoid jargon. And to be clear. It’s a skill that will serve you well, whatever you do with your life.

You learn to figure stuff out — or, to use the jargon, to integrate data. You learn to think on your feet. You learn how to interview people, how to engage them, how to figure out what they have to tell you, and how to get them to tell it to you.

Most important, you learn to write amazingly quickly — and to space — when the deadline finally comes. I have been putting this off for weeks, because the job that Fortune pays me to do kept getting in the way of my writing this. But when deadline time finally came, I wrote this to space (500 words) in little more than an hour.

I hope it doesn’t show. Too much.

Paul Steiger

Born Aug. 15, 1942, spent 15 years as reporter, Washington economics correspondent, and the business editor for The Los Angeles Times; 26 as reporter and editor for The Wall Street Journal; and five as founding editor and CEO of ProPublica, a non-partisan, non-profit, Internet-based investigative newsroom. In 2007, he received SABEW’s Distinguished Achievement Award.

One of the most important roles of business journalism is to hold some of the world’s richest and most powerful people to account. It can be a challenging task, because misbehavior in business is often hard to prove and because the offenders often firmly believe that they have done nothing wrong. The line, for example, between judicious tax avoidance and criminal tax evasion is often narrow.

Yet it is a crucial missed opportunity – even a dereliction of duty to society – for reporters and editors to shrink from this task. Capitalism has many virtues, if the participants play by the rules. It allocates resources efficiently, creates jobs and wealth, and reduces the risk that workers or money will be wasted. But playing by the rules is much more likely if business leaders know that someone is watching.

This came home to me powerfully in the last of my 16 years of editing The Wall Street Journal, 2006-2007. Journal reporters had discovered that there was a high probability that executives at quite a few companies – they initially had identified around 10 – had maneuvered to secretly alter, to “backdate,” the timing of grants of stock options. Options had exploded as a way of compensation, because they allowed favored employees to benefit from the rise in their companies’ stock price without having to put their own money at risk.

As most readers of this will know, a stock option confers the right to buy a certain number of shares at a fixed price for a specified period. If the “strike price” is, say, $100 per share, and the price rises to $150, the employee can buy the stock for $100 and sell it for $150 the same day, realizing an instant $50 profit on each share.

Some executives in the halcyon years at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st realized tens of millions of dollars, or even hundreds of millions of dollars, in this fashion.

Not content with such largesse, some executives and companies began to try to stack the deck. Under options plans approved by shareholders, the strike price was typically tied tightly to the day on which directors approved the option grant. Some companies tried to pick a day when the price was artificially low – such as immediately after a negative news announcement (known to some as “bullet-dodging”) or just before a favorable announcement (“spring loading”). A bit sleazy, but within the letter of the law. The lower the strike price, the greater the chances of ultimate profit .

Going even further, other companies falsified the date on which the option was granted, “backdating” the strike price to a figure days or even weeks earlier when the market price of stock was near a monthly or quarterly low. In itself, backdating wasn’t illegal, so long as shareholders were told.

Because companies didn’t want to change the shareholder-approved option plan, and because of certain unpleasant tax and accounting issues, they typically failed to make the disclosure and change the plan. In other words, they were lying to their shareholders.

Journal reporters couldn’t prove that this was being done. But on March 18, 2006, they produced an extraordinary front-page story, “Perfect Payday.” It identified 10 companies whose pattern of options grants hit so consistently at low price points that, according to rigorous computer analysis, the odds against doing that by chance were better than those against a random $1 bet winning the multi-state Powerball lottery.

Initially, all 10 companies denied backdating and attributed the success to luck. Leading business champions took us to task, saying we were making mountains out of technicality molehills. The late Steve Jobs, the brilliant founder of Apple computer, yelled at me over the phone for half an hour, accusing me of “East Coast bias,” even though I had worked in California long enough that two of my four children were born there.

But led by a couple of top Journal editors, Daniel Hertzberg and Gary Putka (now both at Bloomberg News), reporters Mark Maremont, James Bandler, Charles Forelle, and Steve Stecklow persevered, producing a dozen follow-up stories during the ensuing six weeks.

Soon, directors at companies all around the country were asking, “Do we have a problem?” As they poked into their own records, sometimes with the aid of outside counsel, they found dirty linen that led them to report errant behavior to the authorities, and sometimes oust respected executives. In the end, 130 companies were implicated (including all those in the original story), and 50 top executives or directors resigned or were fired.

Was backdating options the worst transgression business executives have ever committed? Hardly. But in an era of mounting inequality, it only seems fair to hold the most favored few to playing by the rules. This work reminded people with great power that someone is watching, and that’s a noble task.

Born December 1948. Author of the New York Times bestseller The Wizard of Lies: Bernie Madoff and the Death of Trust, and a writer for The New York Times since 1989. She previously worked for Barron’s magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Trenton (N.J.) Times.

If Sylvia Porter were alive today, she would be twice as old as SABEW.

Born on June 18, 1913, Porter was already one of the best-known financial writers in the country when the Society of American Business Editors and Writers was created in 1963. By 1948, the year I was born, her flagship daily column in the New York Post reached more than 40 million Americans and was proudly signed “Sylvia Porter.”

When Editor & Publisher magazine observed in February 1949 that Porter was “the only woman among 10,000 men financial writers,” it was wrong. As early as the 1930s, women financial writers were chipping away at gender barriers at The New York Times, United Press International, the Journal of Commerce and Fortune. Katharine Hamill was hired by Fortune magazine as a research assistant in 1931.

But in 1966, when I went off to college with the fixed determination of becoming a journalist, my role models were few. Pauline Fredericks, who was already covering the United Nations for NBC when I was a child, and Nancy Dickerson, who was covering political conventions for NBC when I was in high school, were the only women in journalism prominent enough for my parents to have noticed them. My mother begged me to consider being an English teacher instead. She was certain my career ambitions would deny me a husband and entrenched sexism would deny me a career.

To its credit, SABEW never excluded women, but its policy was exceptional. The Society of Professional Journalists, founded in 1909, did not admit women until 1969 – earlier than some other journalism organizations but too late, by a year, to be helpful to me. When I was an editor of my award-winning campus paper in Washington, D.C., in 1968, I was not included when my male colleagues hobnobbed with notable Washington journalists during lunches and dinners.

Women reporters were famously confined to the balcony at the National Press Club when newsmakers addressed its male membership over lunch, giving Nan Robertson, one of the pioneering women at The New York Times, the title for her 1992 memoir, “.” The women escaped from the press club balcony in 1971, but it was not until 1975 that they were admitted to the New York Financial Writers’ Association.

It’s different today. Women journalists are working in every sphere, from business news to sports. They have anchored the evening news, moderated presidential debates and reported from war zones. Women are prominent on SABEW’s board and in its annual roster of award winners; its endowed chair at the University of Missouri is held by a formidable woman journalist; and heaven help the man who thinks the women in SABEW can be confined to the balcony anywhere.

Behind that achievement lie a lot of lonely years and countless infuriating, belittling insults borne quietly – or not. I have no patience for women of my vintage who blithely insist they never experienced any discrimination in the workplace. Watch a few “Mad Men” episodes, for heaven’s sake! I suspect that every woman journalist my age has a few jaw-clenching stories in their unwritten memoirs. Porter certainly did.

An unidentified editor quoted in a Time magazine cover story in 1960 had this withering assessment: “Sylvia’s a non-woman.” The great Carol Loomis fought a fierce battle to be admitted to speeches held at the Economics Club in New York. Jane Bryant Quinn smiled through some dumb, sexist moments. Women journalists of the 1960s and 1970s all knew the bone-deep truth of the feminist calculation: A woman had to be twice as good to go half as far.

Sometimes the isolating gestures were subtle. I had an editor at The Philadelphia Inquirer who dealt out incoming corporate press releases to various reporters based on their beats. His habit was to scribble the first name of the intended recipient on the top of the press release. Mine invariably were directed to “Ms. Henriques,” not “Diana.”

Then there were the less subtle insults: The editor who wanted to know what method of birth control I was using as a new bride, so he could be sure I wouldn’t get pregnant and quit if he hired me. The groping accountant, whose offer of a lift to the train station became a jujitsu moment. The state legislator who repeatedly tried to kiss my cheek at press conferences. The paycheck that fell far short of what my male colleagues in identical jobs were making.

As a well-behaved young lady, I didn’t whine or make a big deal out of these small insults at the time. Indeed, I haven’t thought of them for years. In some ways, they shaped my career for the better. Shut out of the late-night “happy hours” at local bars, where my male colleagues gathered hot tips from off-duty cops and tipsy county commissioners, I turned instead to the mortgage and title records at the county courthouse. That’s when I learned the immensely liberating fact that a document doesn’t care if you’re a man or a woman , and document-based scoops fueled my early career advancement. I still say I never met a document I didn’t like!

It is also true that I never met a document that treated me as churlishly as some of the men I had to deal with on a daily basis in those days. So please, don’t expect me to believe there were star-dusted working women who navigated the same professional landscape during those years without ever encountering such behavior.

It went with the territory – and the territory, slowly, was changing. Lawsuits filed in the 1970s against Time Inc., The New York Times and Newsweek helped unlock some doors. I landed my first reporting job in 1969 and was the beneficiary of those efforts. By 1982, I was covering Wall Street for The Philadelphia Inquirer. When I got to Barron’s in 1986, there were already a few women on staff. And when I was hired by The Times in 1989, I joined a business news department already occupied by a number of women journalists, including Sarah Bartlett, Claudia Deutsch, Geraldine Fabrikant and Leslie Wayne.

It is true that women occupy more desks in business newsrooms today, but they are still scarce on the mastheads at major financial publications. The Times has had 10 top financial editors since 1920, none of them women – although Jill Abramson broke the gender barrier at the top of the Times’ masthead when she became executive editor in 2011.

Of course, all this is a perverse reflection of the world we cover, where women CEOs and boardroom directors are still thin on the ground. Hamill, writing in Fortune in 1956, noted that “no woman has yet risen to the upper executive level at a big industrial corporation.” By the magazine’s estimate, there were about 250,000 “real” executives in the country, and fewer than 5,000 of them (2 percent) were women. With women making up more than half of the labor force, the 2012 report by Catalyst shows women filling just more than 14 percent of the executive jobs at Fortune 500 companies, and less than 17 percent of the Fortune 500 boardroom chairs. At that rate, how long will it take for those percentages to get anywhere close to 50 percent?

So it is still an unfinished revolution, and too much remains that Porter would find painfully familiar. As SABEW marks its golden anniversary, and as we all mark the centennial of a pioneering woman financial writer, I find myself reflecting on how I owe the smart, brave women – and enlightened, supportive men – who made my career possible. I hope women working in newsrooms today realize how far we’ve come, how hard we all worked to get here and how much further we have to go.

Eugene Miller

Born Oct. 6, 1925. Described as “Man of Many Hats” because of diverse career as journalist, professor, business executive, Navy commander, public servant: Senior officer of four major companies, served on 14 public and private boards of directors; syndicated newspaper columnist; author; speechwriter for President Dwight Eisenhower; professor at four universities for 30 years. Holds five academic degrees and diploma from Oxford.

Fifty years ago, I wrote an article for the Bulletin of the American Society of Newspaper Editors titled “Requisite for Better Business Pages.” In the lead paragraph, I wrote, “Of the major sections in today’s newspapers, the business and financial pages are probably the worst.”

That article indicated that only a handful of newspapers had above-average business and financial sections despite the growing number of Americans who owned shares of American companies either directly or indirectly through pension and profit-sharing funds.

Part of the problem can be traced to the lack of objectives: apparently, no decision was made as to whether the section should be edited for the investor-reader, local business, or personal business interests. Meanwhile, some of the business journals, such as Business Week, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal, flourished.

This changed with the growing popularity of television and the Internet, as well as the recession. As for the business sections of newspapers, they have returned to their old status because of the shrinking size of the newspapers, caused by their reduced readership, advertising, and profitability.

However, business news and coverage increased on television and through the Internet, and a great number of investment and financial newsletters made their appearance. Business publications that were dependent on advertising suffered, the most notable example being BusinessWeek, which after major financial losses was sold to Bloomberg.

For those interested in business writing, there is still a good deal of opportunity. For those who like the ambiance of living in a small city, I believe the key is to concentrate more on local business. Interviews with the CEO of local firms should be a staple. Covering annual stockholders meetings of local business firms should be a must.

Running personal business articles, with information gleaned from some of the better personal business newsletters, and supplemented with interviews with local financial planners, brokers and insurance agents, also can create a great deal of reader interest.

Business writers in these communities might also consider having a local radio or television program to give reports on local business news or to tackle consumer interest items by interviewing local experts (brokers, bankers, insurance agents, etc.) and use knowledge gained by reading personal finance newsletters.

For those on major newspapers, continue to expand your knowledge of business by attending special business seminars or taking courses at local universities. If you have the time and your employer is willing, you might consider going for an MBA or take an executive MBA program.

You might also try and concentrate on a special area of business in which you can become a real expert. You might also consider writing a book on an area of business which has not been adequately covered.

The key to success as a business journalist in the years ahead is to be flexible. The Internet and television are changing the way the public wants to get financial information and advice.

Working for, or creating your own business newsletter, may be an exciting and profitable way to go. Appearing on television with a business news or feature program can be exciting. Utilizing the Internet to present business news and features will also be an exciting possibility.

The next few years will bring important changes in how business and financial information will be delivered. What is clear is that there will be a growing need for business writers and editors to provide these growing providers with information. The challenges are there. Be sure to take advantage of them.