WSJ’s Zweig to receive Bell Award

The New York Financial Writers’ Association announced Tuesday that Jason Zweig, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and the author and editor of several investing books, is the 2019 winner of NYFWA’s Elliott V. Bell Award, which honors journalists who have made a significant contribution to financial journalism.

Zweig is the 44th annual recipient of the award, named after NYFWA’s inaugural president, Elliott V. Bell. Since 1976, many of the biggest names in financial journalism have joined the list of Elliott V. Bell Award alumni, including John McCorry, Gretchen Morgenson, James B. Stewart, Allan Sloan, Paul Steiger and Carol Loomis, among others.

The award committee recognized Zweig for his decades of service helping average Americans navigate the often-murky world of investing and to make the most of their retirement savings. Zweig continues to do so today through his weekly “Intelligent Investor” column in The Journal. Since Zweig became a personal finance columnist for the Journal in 2008, his column has helped investors better scrutinize their brokers, the fees money managers charge, the fine print and questionable studies that accompany various funds, and to better understand the investor psychology of “Bull” and “Bear” markets alike. He has helped bust investing myths and illuminate investing truths, doing so each week with thoughtfulness and a sense of humor and humility that makes his “Intelligent Investor” column a must-read.

In addition to his work at the Journal, Zweig is also the author of The Devil’s Financial Dictionary, a satirical glossary of Wall Street, and Your Money and Your Brain, on the neuroscience of financial decision-making. Zweig also edited the revised edition of Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor (after which Zweig’s column is named); he wrote The Little Book of Safe Money; co-edited Benjamin Graham: Building a Profession, an anthology of Graham’s essays; and assisted the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman in writing his book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Prior to joining The Wall Street Journal, he was a senior writer for Money magazine, and before that he was the mutual-funds editor at Forbes. Zweig has also been a guest columnist for Time magazine and CNN.com. He has also served as a trustee of the Museum of American Finance, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, and sits on the editorial boards of Financial History magazine and The Journal of Behavioral Finance. He is a graduate of Columbia University, where he was a John Jay National Scholar.

Given the need for ongoing social distancing in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this year’s award will be presented virtually on the evening of Sept. 29. As part of the evening, Zweig will moderate a panel on the topic of “Battling Burnout” that will include Morgenson, the senior financial reporter in the investigations unit at NBC News, and Sloan, a columnist for The Washington Post and an editor at large at ProPublica.