How Ledbetter got interested in business journalism

James Ledbetter

Richard Sandomir of The New York Times looks at the career of business journalist James Ledbetter, who died last week at the age of 60.

Sandomir writes, “Ledbetter was a senior editor at Time magazine; a web editor at Fortune and later the editor of The Big Money, a business spinoff of Slate, the online magazine. The Big Money had the misfortune of starting in September 2008, as the stock market was tanking.

“Nonetheless, he told The New York Times, ‘I think there’s a real opportunity now to tap into people’s interest and even anxiety about the economy.’

“Jacob Weisberg, a Yale classmate of Mr. Ledbetter’s who was the chairman of the Slate Group, said that Mr. Ledbetter’s interest in business journalism most likely began at The Voice.

“‘My sense is that drew him into business questions around media,’ Mr. Weisberg said in an interview. ‘Going back to college, he read Marx and was interested in political economics and the larger questions of the economic structures that undergirded institutions.'”

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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.