Wall Street Journal reporter Nicholas Casey sent out the following on Thursday:
Hi everyone. It’s been eight years, but it’s all done now. I’m finishing my time at The Wall Street Journal this week. I’m heading to The New York Times.
I want to ask you to watch over some of the great leaders this paper produced like Bruce Orwall, Rebecca Blumenstein, Matt Murray. They were my guiding lights, and they can be yours too if they aren’t already. And keep an eye on what the great writers at this paper are up to, like Miriam Jordan and John Emshwiller; Joe Parkinson and Nour Malas; Bill Spindle and David Luhnow; Meg Coker, Jose de Córdoba, Gary Fields, Charles Forelle, Adam Entous, Gordon Fairclough.
It’s a hard time at the Journal now with many people suddenly going away this summer for all sorts of reasons around the Empire. I just want to say before I leave that even if it takes the gestation period of a llama to report your story, sometimes that’s the time it takes. I believe that llamas are noble creatures and it’s those llama-length stories that are remembered. Find new ways to write them!
I wrote a lot of stories from all over. But the story which was my favorite was one I never got a chance to write.
Bruce hired me in 2007, after some lobbying from Miriam. I was living with my mom, who was a single mom. We were in a small trailer next to Highway 101 in Redwood City, CA; a place with just one bedroom, where I’d slept since I was eight and she moved her mattress into the living room. My mom never read The Wall Street Journal. No one there had.
But that changed when I moved to the LA buro – to cover the toy industry of all things! – and the newspaper started to arrive to her doorstep. M&I was never her thing, but she got some joy from the aheds, the Weekend section and mostly anything I’d write. As I moved up through the paper, my beats got more interesting. Yet no matter what war zone or rich potentate I’d been writing about, when I came home to the trailer park for Thanksgiving, I wasn’t a Wall Street Journal reporter — I was my mother’s son, living in place she’d raised me in. Those trips home kept me from getting a big head.
But a year ago the chance came up for me to buy her own home, and I took it. A green-and-white wooden house from 1870s with a picket fence and an acre of land. It’s a wonderful little place. We call it “The House the Journal Bought.”
So if there’s one thing the Journal has to teach, I would say it’s this: Remember your mom.
Remember where you came from. I came from the Journal.
I’ll remember you. Thanks so much for everything.
