WSJ’s Olshan’s ode to the newsrooms

Jeremy Olshan, who is departing The Wall Street Journal where he has been personal finance bureau chief, writes about the newsrooms he’s worked in and reminisces about how he got to be editor in chief of MarketWatch.com.

Olshan writes, “Almar Latour changed my life. He also saved me from death.

“I had been offered an amazing opportunity writing and rethinking The Wall Street Journal’s obituaries. Kirsten Danis asked me to do some sample obits, so I filed one on a personal finance legend, and another on our current president. I was ready to take on the dead beat, but…

“‘We’re putting that job offer on hold,’ Almar told me a week later. ‘Something else has come up.’

“That something was the editor in chief job at MarketWatch. I thought he was nuts. But he saw things in me I never saw in myself, and had a knack for motivating people to exceed expectations.

“A day later I returned to his office without much of a poker face.

“‘Now you want it,’ he smiled. Almar saw things in me I never saw in myself, and had a knack for motivating people to exceed expectations.”

Read more 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.