Categories: OLD Media Moves

Departing WSJ reporter: What the paper means to me

Katie Rosman, who is leaving The Wall Street Journal for a job at the New York Times, writes on Medium about what the Journal stands for.

Rosman writes, “I love calling sources and identifying myself as a Wall Street Journal reporter. There is no cooler title: Wall Street Journal reporter. It connotes knowledge, discipline, humanity, shoe leather, ingenuity, style and wit. It has put me, by association, in far better company than I deserve.

“After a decade of days as a Wall Street Journal reporter, today is my last. Change is scary, bittersweet and, sometimes, creatively important.

“I remember asking an editor, very early in my tenure, ‘How do I know if people at the paper think my work is any good?’

“He answered, ‘How do you know if we think your work is any good? You know when we publish it in the Wall Street Journal.’

“A snooty response, I think we can all agree. But his message stuck with me. At the Journal, reporters and editors never stop toiling to be worthy of the institution.”

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.