Coast, former biz editor at Press-Enterprise, dies at 64

Mark Coast, the former business editor of The Press-Enterprise in California, died April 28 at the age of 64 from cancer.

Sarah Hofmann writes, “He joined the newspaper as the assistant metro editor of the southwest Riverside County bureau, based in Temecula. He later became the deputy metro editor, working from the paper’s downtown Riverside headquarters. He later served again as editor of the Temecula-based bureau and was the newspaper’s business editor, as well as editor of The Business Press, which was published by the company.

“‘Mark’s tenure as business editor coincided with some of the biggest business stories of the time,’ Kim Pierceall, a former reporter of his, wrote in an email. She cited The Great Recession and its bank collapses, bankruptcies and ‘growing unemployment to the Inland Empire.’

“‘I felt so out of my league,’ she wrote. ‘Mark, though, never seemed to doubt that I or our team could rise to the occasion in covering the story. He could recognize the potential in a person that they couldn’t see themselves.'”

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