Category Archives: CUNY

Let the Sun Shine In

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Source: ASU News

Professors at Arizona State University’s honors college were deeply troubled by plans for right-wingers Dennis Prager and Charlie Kirk to speak at a confab last February exploring “Health, Wealth and Happiness.” But their impassioned reaction raises important issues about just what free discourse on a campus means.

“Thirty-nine of [the college’s] 47 faculty signed a letter to the dean condemning the event on grounds that the speakers are ‘purveyors of hate who have publicly attacked women, people of color, the LGBTQ community, [and] institutions of our democracy,’ event organizer Ann Atkinson writes in The Wall Street Journal. “The signers decried ASU ‘platforming and legitimating’ their views, describing Messrs. Prager and Kirk as ‘white nationalist provocateurs’ whose comments would undermine the value of democratic exchange by marginalizing the school’s most vulnerable students.”

Despite that faculty outcry, the event, sponsored by the college’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development, attracted 1,500 people in person and 24,000 online, according to Atkinson. She described the talks as part of a speaker series connecting students with professionals for career and life advice.

Now, in the wake of the flap, however, the university is shutting down the center, effective June 30. Atkinson, an alum of the college who made her name and fortune in healthcare real estate investing, will lose her job. And, in the WSJ piece, headlined “I paid for free speech at Arizona State,” she slams the university for its “deep hostility toward divergent views.” She concludes that “ASU claims to value freedom of expression. But in the end the faculty mob always wins against institutional protections for free speech.”

Among universities nationwide, ASU is hardly alone in battles over whether some speakers are simply beyond the pale. Debates over visitors of all stripes have roiled campuses from Princeton in the east to Stanford in the west. For a bit of detail, see “What Are the Limits of Free Speech?” While conservative speakers have been at the center of most of the hubbub, the occasional left-winger has slipped in, as happened at the CUNY law school with a pro-Palestinian’s vitriolic talk condemning Israel, capitalism and a host of other bogeymen. See “A Commencement Rant Suggests Poor Schooling.”

The brouhahas raise plenty of questions for anyone interested in open exchange on colleges. They go to the heart of what freedom of speech is and isn’t.

Here are a few such questions: At what point are faculty members being too protective of students in wanting to shut out speakers whose views — no doubt — will offend many? Are students so vulnerable that they should be shielded from obnoxious views? Would they be exposed to noxious notions through the Internet and other venues anyway? And is there anything preventing faculty from criticizing the speakers, essentially turning their appearances into teachable moments, occasions for poking holes in the most outrageous arguments?

Many provocative speakers – on both the left and right – are hardly unique or original in their views. Their opinions percolate about in the zeitgeist, almost always for ill, and are rarely avoided. Indeed, the ideas espoused by some of them have become mainstream in some partisan talking points in the already boiling presidential race.

Is it better to ban such folks or to have faculty members whom students respect intellectually disembowel them? Will reprehensible views go away when a campus here or a campus there simply bars the advocates? And does welcoming such folks reflect badly on a given campus, especially if the purpose of the invitation is for smarter folks to defenestrate their arguments?

Dennis Prager, source: The Daily Beast

Let’s stipulate that radio host Prager has outraged many folks. He condemned Covid lockdowns, lambasted same-sex marriage, and even criticized a Muslim congressman for using the Quran instead of the Bible in a swearing-in ceremony. Raised in an Orthodox Jewish household, Prager extols Judeo-Christian traditions above all others, a view that resonates with some but would hardly play well in much of the world outside of the West (indeed in most of the world, in sheer population numbers).

Charlie Kirk, source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Similarly, let’s acknowledge that Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, seems like a throwback to an idealized 1950s. His attacks on feminism and “the transgender agenda” – whatever that is — likely appear wacky to many folks, though not to the future “trad wives” who attended sessions such as the recent Young Women’s Leadership Summit, held fittingly in Texas. Attendees heard about buying tampons and beauty products and other items from companies that market themselves as pro-Christian or anti-woke, as a Washington Post writer noted.

But are campuses, in fact, doing a disservice to their students and larger communities when they prevent them from airing their odd views? There’s no doubt that some views and some speakers are intolerable – one thinks of leaders of the KKK and Nazis on the right and some pro-Palestinian speakers on the left, of course. And attacking folks for their race, religion or sexual orientation in general should keep some speakers off limits.

But even in some of those areas, is it not risky to shut off discussion? For instance, the arguments for and against Critical Race Theory would seem to deserve a full airing. And, when it comes to religion, should there not be room for talking about, say, whether images deemed inappropriate by some Muslims should be shut out of art classes? And would discussions of cults benefit from the airing of such documentaries as Shiny Happy People, a critical exploration of a form of Christianity that some defend but others find odd and dangerous?

As to sexual orientation, many on the right are making hay of attacking homosexuality and transgenderism these days. Some folks, succumbing to the demagoguery of the day, apparently don’t or won’t grasp that respecting gays and transgender folks seems like basic decency. Should there not be room for education about such matters, even if it comes in a debate or counter-programming involving a Kirk or a Prager?

Plenty of odd and disturbing views are coursing through a troubled America nowadays, but it seems that campuses could harm students by not letting them get a full –- and critical — airing. Put them under the microscope, expose them to the hot lights of bright academics. Instead of banning the advocates, would we not be better off pitting them against intelligent opponents in settings where the vacuousness of their ideas could be exposed?

Yes, that is admittedly “platforming” them, as the ASU faculty noted. But have the Internet and social media not already platformed them far more effectively, giving people only one side of the story? Are campuses immune to noxious ideas just because they aren’t delivered in person?

Free speech is often not pretty. But does one defeat ugly ideas by simply shutting off some of the outlets in which exponents could espouse them? Would it not be better to expose racism, hypocrisy, venality, ignorance and such for what they are, holding them up to scrutiny on an enlightened campus?

Letting Kirk and Prager and their ilk speak while showing up the bankruptcy of their ideas would not win over all students. For evidence of their appeal, just look at their popularity in off-campus venues. Still, an intellectual free-for-all would offer a chance to win over the sharper students. There is such a thing as a battle of ideas, and these days the best ideas must be allowed to win.

Tenure is more than a job for life

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TenureMountainThe letter was short, barely filling a page. But the message, for me, was a big deal. The vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln let me know this week that I had successfully run a 5 ½-year long gauntlet and qualified for tenure.

I choked up. I felt like a 17-year-old getting accepted into the college of his dreams. The news about what technically is called “continuous appointment” meant more to me than I had expected. It meant more than just job security; it meant I had been accepted by my peers, my dean and the people who fill the upper reaches of my Big Ten university as someone they’d like to work with for as long as I could command a podium in a classroom.

That acceptance, that ratification of my role as a mentor to young people, that endorsement of my teaching and research skills – it was like getting my first car or going on a first date. It summoned up sepia-colored images of my father – someone who had not even graduated from high school – calling me and an academically inclined sister his little professors. We were the ones who pulled As, the ones he could see in classrooms, occupying places he respected.

I was surprised at my own reaction, though, partly because I’ve been conflicted about tenure. After all, I managed to stay 22 years at my last job, at BusinessWeek, without it, and had worked at three other news organizations before without it. At each place, I was only as good – and secure – as my next story. My job security depended on shifting arrays of bosses and the economic health of my employer. And that seemed fine to me – even just, if one believes healthy capitalism requires dynamic labor markets where jobs must come and go, where there is no room for sinecures.

For years I’ve been sympathetic to a view that a former colleague at BusinessWeek put into writing recently. Sarah Bartlett, marking her first anniversary as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, complained that the “tenure system can create a permanent class of teachers who may not feel much pressure to constantly refresh their skills or renew their curricula.” Tenure, she suggested, would atrophy programs rather than create the “vibrant academic cultures” that journalism schools, in particular, need at a time of great industry ferment.

SkeletonBut does tenure serve mainly to shield those who would resist change? Does it do little more than protect aging old bulls and cows who should long ago have been turned out to pasture? Does it guarantee that hoary old fossils will dominate classrooms, spouting outdated and irrelevant approaches? Does the pursuit of tenure, moreover, drive aspiring faculty members to do pointless impractical research that doesn’t help the journalism world or the J schools themselves, as Sarah also implied?

Well, I look around at my tenured colleagues at UNL and see the opposite. As one pursued tenure, she wrote a textbook for training copy editors. Sue Burzynski Bullard’s text – “Everybody’s An Editor: Navigating journalism’s changing landscape” – should be standard fare in any forward-looking J school. Because it is an interactive ebook, the now-tenured Bullard is able to – and does – refresh the book regularly. Another colleague, John R. Bender, regularly updates “Reporting for the Media,” an impressive text that he and three colleagues wrote. It’s now in its 11th edition. A third colleague, Joe Starita, produced “I Am A Man: Chief Standing Bear’s Journey for Justice,” setting a high bar for storytelling and research that contributes to an emphasis at our school in journalism about Native Americans. This was Starita’s third book and he’s toiling on a fourth, even as he inspires students in feature-writing and reporting classes.

And that productivity by tenured faculty isn’t limited to written work. Starita teamed up with multimedia-savvy journalism sequence head Jerry Renaud to shepherd the impressive Native Daughters project about American Indian women. Bernard R. McCoy, a colleague who teaches mainly (but not exclusively) in the broadcasting sequence, has produced documentaries including “Exploring the Wild Kingdom,” a public-TV effort about the most popular wildlife program in television history. Another of his works, “They Could Really Play the Game: Reloaded,” tells the story of an extraordinary 1950s college basketball team. And he’s now working on a production about WWI Gen. John J. Pershing.

Tenure doesn’t mean that creative work ends or innovations in the classroom cease. Each of my colleagues has had to adapt to the digital world. Some still prefer to teach in older ways – one quaintly requires students to hand in written papers that he grades by hand, for instance. But even he teams up with visually oriented colleagues to guide students to produce work as today’s media organizations demand it. Charlyne Berens, a colleague, and I teamed up with the Omaha World-Herald just last spring to guide students to produce a 16-part series that boasts print, online and multimedia elements, The Engineered Foods Debate. Charlyne, who recently retired as our associate dean, wrote several works, including “One House,” about the peculiar unicameral Nebraska legislature, and another about the former Secretary of Defense, “Chuck Hagel: Moving Forward.”

tenuretelescopeAs for me, the pursuit of tenure gave me the impetus to write my first book, “Transcendental Meditation in America: How a New Age Movement Remade a Small Town in Iowa.” I’m now working on a second book, exploring the reasons that drive people to join cults. I’m also developing curricula for business and economic journalism instruction that I hope will serve business school and J school students, including those interested in investor relations. The pursuit of tenure also drove me to develop research for academic journals, encouraging me to look into areas as far-flung as journalism training in China, as well as such practical work as the teaching of business journalism, the challenges of teaching fair-minded approaches to aspiring journalists, and the pros and cons of ranking journalism schools – all topics for forthcoming journal publication.

Forgive me for beating my own chest. I don’t mean to. I am humbled by the work that my colleagues at the J school and across the university do. It is an enormous honor for them to consider me a peer and, assuming that the university’s regents in September agree with our vice chancellor, I expect that I will spend the next decade or so trying to live up to that.

Food bills rising? Let’s blame Wall Street.

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Wonder why prices for food and other commodities are higher now than they were a decade ago? Forget the rise in population to nearly 7 billion souls. Disregard the astonishing expansion of economies in China and elsewhere. No, it’s the sinister folks at Goldman Sachs who have made wheat so costly.

We know this thanks to Foreign Policy, published by the Slate unit of the Washington Post Co. The revelation appeared April 27, under the headline “How Goldman Sachs Created the Food Crisis.” The subhed: “Don’t blame American appetites, rising oil prices, or genetically modified crops for rising food prices. Wall Street’s at fault for the spiraling cost of food.”

I share this because I continue to be amazed at how those evil folks, speculators, keep popping up as piñatas for politicians, conspiracy theorists and the ill-informed. Even smart people believe this pap. Witness President Obama’s recent attack on speculators for boosting gas prices, a fresh assault that includes a federal investigation. Clearly, the appeal of a bogus idea can be irresistible.

In the FP piece, Frederick Kaufman argues that the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index lays at the center of a nasty web of big-money players who have cast farmers into near-irrelevancy. Even “bona fide” big players –- including corporations that buy and sell cereals for use –- have been sidelined by speculators, he tells us. The speculator –- who “neither produces nor consumes corn or soy or wheat,” and thus is evil by definition, has risen to be a menace, Kaufman suggests. Speculators now vastly outnumber the legit folks thanks to the GSCI and the popularity of investment products based on the index.

To market-watchers, these ideas may pluck familiar strings. Kaufman sang the tune in a July 2010 Harper’s cover story, making few friends at Goldman. Steve Strongin, the firm’s head of Global Investment Research, fired back at the time: “Long-term trends, including increased meat consumption by the growing middle class in the emerging markets and the increased use of biofuels in the developed markets, have created a backdrop for global food shortages and, as a result, millions are left desperately exposed to the vagaries of the weather for their survival. It is a shame that the plight of these millions appears to merit a cover story in your magazine only when it is exploited as a pretext to launch unsubstantiated attacks against the financial industry.”

As his latest effort shows, however, Kaufman remains unbowed.

“Today, bankers and traders sit at the top of the food chain – the carnivores of the system, devouring everyone and everything below,” writes Kaufman, an associate professor of English and Journalism who can turn a phrase well. “Near the bottom toils the farmer. For him, the rising price of grain should have been a windfall, but speculation has also created spikes in everything the farmer must buy to grow his grain – from seed to fertilizer to diesel fuel. At the very bottom lies the consumer.”

Further, he suggests, people across the world are starving thanks to this system. Some 250 million people joined the ranks of the hungry in 2008, bringing the total of the world’s “food insecure” to 1 billion, a number never seen before. This, it appears, is the fault of the speculative fury that followed creation of the GSCI in 1991 and, worse, deregulation of futures in 1999. Prices have soared thanks to the rush of money, including a lot of dumb money, in the markets.

Finally, the author argues that the evil geniuses at Goldman Sachs rigged the game by devising the index as a long-only product. “Every time the due date of a long-only commodity index futures contract neared, bankers were required to ‘roll’ their multi-billion dollar backlog of buy orders over into the next futures contract, two or three months down the line,” he says. Evidently, none could ever cash out their stakes, a notion that may surprise those who have done so.

Kaufman offers a few nuggets of data — sort of — to buttress his argument. Mainly, he zeroes in on 2008 when commodities were lofted in a short-lived bubble. Hard spring wheat, usually $4-$6 a bushel, topped $25 at one point, he says. And he notes that the worldwide price of food rose 80% from 2005 to 2008 and has kept rising, though he doesn’t say what is being measured as food or who is doing the measuring.

But all that is beside the point. Kaufman omits the inconvenient truth that in the last decade prices have fallen, as well as risen, in commodities and commodity-linked investments. The iShares S&P GSCI Commodity-Index Trust jumped from about $50 a share in July 2006 to above $76 in June 2008, but plunged below $23 by February 2009 before clawing its way back to about $40 now. The wheat he refers to now fetches about $9 a bushel at the Minneapolis Grain Exchange, a far cry from $25. Long only or not, investors have made or lost money as prices roller-coastered. This escalator doesn’t have only an up button.

Certainly it’s possible that the surge of money into commodity-related products has made pricing more volatile. The growth of buyers and sellers in any market might do that. But, could they force an unbroken upward climb detached from basic supply and demand issues? That would ignore the global surge in demand for food and commodities. Moreover, it would be blind to drought, blight, excessive wetness at planting time and other weather-related factors — some of which figured into the February 2008 surge in wheat prices. Blame the billions of hungry folks out there, not Wall Street’s thousands.

Of course, Kaufman’s logical flaws don’t end there. His fingering Goldman’s index as the root of evil, especially because of its long-only nature, is at best silly. Plenty of other vehicles for commodity investing beckon. “Just because you cannot short through this fund does not mean that you cannot short elsewhere nor that you cannot sell your shares once you think prices have peaked,” says Craig R. MacPhee, an economist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln who specializes in global development and trade. “There may be speculative buying that drives up prices at least temporarily, but I doubt that the GSCI has anything to do with it.”

Goldman isn’t taking Kaufman’s broadside laying down. Managing director Lucas Van Praag in a May 3 rebuttal argues that the writer “does not present any credible evidence that commodity index investing is responsible for the rise in food prices. Serious inquires, such as one conducted by the OECD in the wake of the 2008 price spike, have concluded that ‘index funds did not cause a bubble in commodity futures prices.’ Rather than destabilizing futures markets, commodity index funds provide them with a stable pool of capital, improving farmers’ ability to insure themselves against the risks inherent in agricultural prices. This, in turn, can allow farmers to produce more food at a lower cost.”

And, by the way, Goldman has not owned its index since 2007, when S&P acquired it. Goldman’s folks noted this in 2010 and reiterated it again in the rebuttal.

Regrettably, facts sometimes do get in the way of a good story. And suspicion of the futures markets may be inevitable. Farmers have cast a wary eye on Chicago sharpies for decades, resenting them for seemingly setting prices growers had to settle for. Never mind the underlying supply and demand curve or the combat among shorts and longs at the exchanges.

Today, most people don’t have a clue what goes on in these markets. Players who rely on opaque math and hunches are likely disinclined to share the secrets of their successes (or failures). And, yes, occasionally bad actors do try to game the markets. But if the folks at Goldman could pull off half the manipulation ill-informed writers suspect them of, they’d be a heck of lot richer than they already are and that’s saying something.

Making business journalism sexy (almost)

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Looking for ways to make business journalism come alive for students? How about creating scavenger hunts for juicy tidbits in corporate government filings? What about mock press conferences that play PR and journalism students against one another? Then there are some sure bets – awarding $50 gift cards to local bars for mock stock-portfolio performances and showing students how to find the homes and salaries of university officials and other professors – including yourself — on the Net.

These were among the ideas savvy veteran instructors offered at the Business Journalism Professors Seminar last week at Arizona State University. The program, offered by the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, brought together as fellows 15 profs from such universities as Columbia, Kansas State, Duquesne and Troy, as well as a couple schools in Beijing, the Central University of Finance & Economics and the University of International Business and Economics. I was privileged to be among those talented folks for the week.

We bandied about ideas for getting 20-year-olds (as well as fellow faculty and deans) excited about business journalism in the first place. The main answer was, of course, jobs. If they’d like good careers in journalism that pay well, offer lots of room to grow and that can be as challenging at age 45 as at 20, there really are few spots in the field to match. These days, with so much contraction in the field, business and economic coverage is one of the few bright spots, with opportunity rich at places such as Reuters, Bloomberg News, Dow Jones and the many Net places popping up.

The key, of course, is to persuade kids crazy for sports and entertainment that biz-econ coverage can be fun. The challenge is that many of them likely have never picked up the Wall Street Journal or done more than pass over the local rag’s biz page. The best counsel, offered by folks such as UNC Prof. Chris Roush, Ohio University’s Mark W. Tatge, Washington & Lee’s Pamela K. Luecke and Reynolds Center president Andrew Leckey, was to make the classes engaging, involve students through smart classroom techniques and thus build a following. Some folks, such as the University of Kansas’ James K. Gentry, even suggest sneaking economics and (shudder) math in by building in novel exercises with balance sheets and income statements.

Once you have the kids, these folks offered some cool ideas for keeping their interest:

— discuss stories on people the students can relate to, such as the recent Time cover on Mark Zuckerberg or the May 2003 piece in Fortune on Sheryl Crow and Steve Jobs, and make sure to flash them on the screen (at the risk of offending the more conservative kids, I might add the seminude photo BW ran of Richard Branson in 1998)

— scavenger hunts. Find nuggets of intriguing stuff in 10Ks or quarterly filings by local companies or familiar outfits such as Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, Buffalo Wild Wings, Hot Topic, The Buckle, Kellogg, etc., and craft a quiz of 20 or so questions to which the students must find the answers

— run contests in class to see who can guess a forthcoming unemployment rate, corporate quarterly EPS figure or inflation rate

— compare a local CEO’s pay with that of university professors, presidents or coaches, using proxy statements and Guidestar filings to find figures

— conduct field trips to local brokerage firm offices, businesses or, if possible, Fed facilities

— have student invest in mock stock portfolios and present a valuable prize at the end, such as a gift certificate or a subscription to The Economist (a bar gift card might be a bit more exciting to undergrads, I’d wager)

— follow economists’ blogs, such as Marginal Revolution and Economists Do It With Models, and get discussions going about opposing viewpoints

— turn students onto sites such as businessjournalism.org, Talking Biz News, and the College Business Journalism Consortium

— have students interview regular working people about their lives on the job

— discuss ethical problems that concern business reporters, using transgressors such as R. Foster Winans as examples. Other topics for ethical discussions might include questions about taking a thank-you bouquet of flowers from a CEO or traveling on company-paid trips, as well dating sources or questions about who pays for lunch

— discuss business journalism celebs, such as Lou Dobbs and Dan Dorfman

— discuss scandals such as the Chiquita International scandal (Cincinnati Enquirer paid $10 m and fired a reporter after he used stolen voicemails)

— use films such as “The Insider,” “Wall Street,” and “Social Network” to discuss business issues

— use short clips from various films to foster discussions of how businesses operate. Good example: “The Corporation”

— team up with PR instructors to stage a mock news conference competition pitting company execs in a crisis against journalism students. Great opportunity for both sides to strut their stuff.

We also heard helpful suggestions from employers, particularly Jodi Schneider of Bloomberg News and Ilana Lowery of the Phoenix Business Journal, along with handy ideas from Leckey and Reynolds executive director Linda Austin, a former business editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer. My biggest takeaway: run some mock job interviews with students and teach them to send handwritten thank-you notes.

And we were treated to some smart presentations by journalists Diana B. Henriques of the New York Times about the art of investigative work (look for her new Madoff book), the University of Nevada’s Alan Deutschman about the peculiar psychologies of CEOs (narcissists and psychopaths are not uncommon), the University of Missouri’s Randall Smith’s view of the future for business journalists (it’s raining everywhere but less on business areas). We got some fresh takes on computer-aided reporting, too, by Steve Doig of the ASU Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication as well as on social media by the Reynolds Center’s Robin J. Phillips.

For anyone interested in journalism, especially biz journalism, it was a great week. As I take the lessons from ASU to heart, my students will be better off. My thanks to the folks there.

A mentor’s passing

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Chris Welles, a longtime editor at BUSINESS WEEK and former teacher of mine, died the other day. Chris Roush, who edits the blog Talking Biz News, ran the piece below.

I suspect it is one of many tributes to come about Welles, a major figure in business journalism.  I had occasion to write about Welles myself a few weeks ago. He and another former BW editor, Ron Krieger, introduced me to the foreign world of business journalism in 1980 at the Columbia J School. It’s not too great a stretch to say the pair changed my life.

Welles asked tough questions of business people, making for penetrating journalism. He had a hand in much of the best work BW published. Only time will tell, but I believe that BW peaked during Welles’ time there.

Some profound thoughts here by a former editor for us all at BW:

Ex-BusinessWeek editor Shepard fondly remembers Welles  — 2010.06.21

Talking Biz News asked Steve Shepard, the editor of BusinessWeek from 1985 to 2005, for some thoughts about business journalist Chris Welles, who worked at BusinessWeek for 13 years and died this weekend.

Here is what Shepard, now the dean at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, had to say:

“Chris Welles was a genuinely good guy with a journalistic soul. He very much believed that it was the job of the press to hold people in power accountable for their actions and to ferret out wrongdoing. He spent his career doing that, first as a writer, then as a senior editor at Business Week. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, Chris was probably the premier business writer around, the guy who did the tough stories.

“In his early years, Chris was one of the regulator writers for Institutional Investor, an innovative magazine about Wall Street in the 1970s. He specialized in narrative accounts of shennaigans, abuses, and downfalls. He was also a very successful freelancer, contributing to New York magazine, among others. From 1977 to 1985, he headed the Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia University. I had served as the first director (1975-76) and Soma Golden the second (1976-77). The program ran into financial difficulties during Chris’s tenure, but he fought to continue it and eventually weathered the storm. Now called the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism, it has just finished its 35th year as a mid-career opportunity for business journalists.

“When I was editor-in-chief of Business Week, I jumped at the chance to hire Chris in the mid 1980s as a senior writer specializing in investigative and narrative pieces. Though he was soft-spoken and always polite, he was a tenacious reporter with a passion to get the bad guys. I eventually promoted him to senior editor in the finance department because I figured his impact would be felt more by having him work with writers every week rather than write a piece himself every couple of months. And I wanted him to teach the next generation of upcoming reporters. Chris took to editing like a fish to water, passing along a lot of knowledge about finance, a lot of wisdom about reporting complex stories. He was respected and liked by his colleagues.

“Like Lou Gehrig in 1939, Chris started losing some of his skills, and nobody knew why. He was eventually diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease and retired from Business Week. It was a tragedy for him and his wife Nancy, and a terrible loss for all of us. He took business journalism to a new level, setting the bar ever higher for the rest of us. He has left a legacy for all of us to honor.”

Business Journalism: Is There a Tomorrow?

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A cynic might say that Steve Shepard, my old boss at BUSINESS WEEK, has to believe there is a future for the scribbler’s art. He runs the graduate school of journalism at City University of New York after all.

But it’s more than just where he sits that determines where he stands. Steve is a star in the field. The inveterate New Yorker — betrayed by both his accent and his misguided love of the Yankees — has collected just about every award available to magazine journalists. He knows what readers need.

The best proof of that is how he resuscitated the BW franchise. He turned the magazine into a growth vehicle, in the ’80s, after long-time parent McGraw-Hill had begun treating it as a cash cow, an aging brand that had plateaued in the market. In fact, Shepard later saw the book grow so fat that we had to turn away ads because the page count was busting the staples. That happy time was less than a decade ago. Sadly, of course, it is far thinner today.

Steve offered his views on the future of business journalism in this intriguing interview. He’s upbeat about BW’s future under Bloomberg. He’s convinced, too, that there is a future for business news reporting, though it will have to adapt to new formats. Take a gander:

The Future of Business Journalism from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

Steve, I believe, is spot on that business journalism will endure. The information that business journalists report — whether up-to-the-minute on the wires or in more long-form settings — is too important for people who have money on the line. Can you imagine if Wall Street ran only on rumors (something that sometimes happens already)?

Of course, the issue is how business journalism will support itself. Bloomberg is an intriguing model, since the biggest consumers of its news service pay a lot for it, something on the order of $20,000 a year for access to the famed Bloomberg terminal. Problem is, that’s a limited market, chiefly serious traders on Wall Street.

Bloomberg’s purchase of BW last fall was designed, in part, to expose the outfit’s news and information to a broader audience. BW brought it some 4.5 million readers in print and even more users of the BW Web site. The pub, with its 80-year-old brand name, is quite a crowd-broadener.

But plenty of questions loom. Steve argues, for instance, that there’s room for one long-form business mag. So, does that mean that Forbes and Fortune disappear? And will Bloomberg subsidize BW if it can’t grow fat again with ads? Is it sufficient that it be a marketing vehicle for the name and terminals or other outlets Bloomberg may develop for its products? Can the product succeed as a loss-leader?

Some folks argue that the general news service at Bloomberg is a big loss-leader already. Former colleagues of mine, such as Steve Baker, contend that traders pay for relatively narrow slices of information relevant to their work and ignore the bulk of the news on the machine. Of course, since Bloomberg is private, outsiders can’t know for sure how the news service fares financially.

For fans of long-form business journalism, the question is whether the format can survive only if it has a Big Daddy like Bloomberg. Will analytic and insightful work, the kind that made BW great, pay its own way? Will consumers pay anywhere near what it costs, now that so many advertisers have found other more cost-effective vehicles? Is the current slump more a reflection of economic stress or something deeper? Will business pubs prove to be niche operations serving elite audiences, much in the way that Harper’s or The Atlantic do?

At the end of the day, it seems clear that people who need financial and economic news will be served. They may be served over cell phones, iPads, the Net or someday by brain implants — who knows? — but their demand for information will be met. The challenge for business journalists is to figure out how to make sure these folks pay the freight so they can keep churning out top-quality work. And, for budding journalists, the challenge is to make sure that they can serve up the goods in whatever form the market requires.