How CNBC’s Faber got his start in business journalism

Investopedia editor in chief Caleb Silver spoke with David Faber, co-anchor of CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street,” about his career.

Faber has broken some of the biggest mergers and acquisition deals of the past 30 years.

“I was not in anyway someone with an economics background,” said Faber, who majored in English at Tufts University. “I got lucky.” He started writing for a weekly Institutional Investor newsletter covering corporate lending.

“There were 2,000 people who cared about that, and they paid a lot of money” for that information, said Faber.

He was hired by CNBC in 1993. At that time, business news television did not have a culture of breaking stories.

“I picked the phone up. That’s not what they hired me to do, but that’s what I did,” he said, noting that when he went to the assignment desk to tell an editor he had a story, they would reply that the news wasn’t on the wires.

To listen, go here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.