Owff Business

Dean Rotbart of the 2020 Business News Visionary Awards interviewed Terri Thompson, who served as the director of Columbia University’s Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism from 1993 to 2018.

Thompson was  Knight-Bagehot Fellow in 1980-81. “It changed my life in every single way possible,” said Thompson. “It was intimidating. It was extremely tough.”

Lew Young, the editor at BusinessWeek, hired her after she completed the degree, to cover corporate finance. She also covered real estate and energy. At U.S. News & World Report, she covered personal finance and banking.

When she was hired to run the Knight-Bagehot program, it was financially struggling. She was able to raise the money to make it a permanently endowed program.

As of May 2020, Columbia University graduated 45 Bagehot classes and 412 journalists completed the program, and 239 of those participated under Thompson’s directorship.

Of the Bagehots

The Wall Street Journal staffers have been pressing newsroom leaders to make fundamental changes in how the newspaper covers race, policing, business and other topics, reports Marc Tracy and Ben Smith of the New York Times.

Tracy and Smith report, “In a June 23 letter to the editor in chief, Matt Murray, a group identifying itself only as ‘members of the WSJ newsroom’ said the paper must ‘encourage more muscular reporting about race and social inequities,’ and laid out detailed proposals for revising its news coverage.