Business journalist Gersten has died

Alan Gersten, a longtime business journalist who had been working for Reuters for the past eight years, died March 17 from leukemia.

Gersten was also maritime editor of the Journal of Commerce and business editor of the Rocky Mountain News from 1979 to 1985. At Reuters, he was a Latin America correspondent.

It was at the News that Gersten won a Gerald Loeb Award, considered the Pulitzer Prizes of business journalism, for columns/editorials for an investment series called “Gambling with Someone Else’s Money.”

Gersten was also the author of “A Conspiracy of Indifference: The Raoul Wallenberg story.” As a Jew, Gersten knew about Wallenberg and his heroic deeds in wartime Hungary. In 1994, he met some lawyers involved in a law case related to Wallenberg. This was an effort to free the Hero of the Holocaust via the courts.

For Gersten, that started a seven-year quest to write a book about Wallenberg. This involved going through thousands of records in Washington, the Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, trips to Chicago to talk to key participants in the narrative as well as telephone calls to Sweden and Switzerland.

Gersten went through the Knight-Bagehot program at Columbia University. He also had an undergraduate degree from the University of Illinois.

“Alan will be sorely missed by all who knew and loved him,” said Terri Thompson, who runs the Knight-Bagehot program at Columbia. “As a model business journalist, he mentored young reporters, and as an alumnus of the Knight-Bagehot Program, he contributed generously to the profession. Dedicated to his wife, Marjorie, he is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever known.”