Feuerstein remembers how TheStreet changed business journalism

Biotech reporter Adam Feuerstein, who is leaving TheStreet.com after 16 years to join STAT, writes about how the financial news site changed business journalism.

Feuerstein writes, “More than anything, I wanted very badly to work for Jim Cramer and TheStreet.com. Cramer, the frenetic former hedge-fund manager was re-inventing financial journalism for the web. Remember, this was 2001, when nearly all financial news websites were just cut-and-paste copies of articles repurposed from newspapers and magazines. Finance blogs did not exist. There was no FinTwits community, no @TheStalwart. Josh Brown wasn’t yet ‘Downtown.’ It’s crazy to think about this now, but until Cramer founded TheStreet.com, original market commentary and analysis of stocks, served up in real time on the web, barely existed.

“Barry Ritholtz calls Cramer the ‘big bang of financial blogging’ and the guy who ‘democratized’ financial research and reporting on the web. By 2001, I had been a professional business journalist for 11 years. I was no cub reporter. But the reporters and editors hired by Kansas, directed by Cramer, were taking financial reporting on the web in an entirely new direction. I wanted on TheStreet.com train, so if landing a job meant bluffing my way through a biotech beat until I figured shit out, I’d do it.

“Sixteen years later, my career at TheStreet comes to an end. Next week, I start a new job as a senior writer and national biotech columnist for STAT.

“I will not bore you with a sweeping history of my career at TheStreet since the day Kansas hired me. I have no grand life lessons to offer you. All I’ll say about myself is that my goal at TheStreet, always, was to write about the biotech industry in a way that helped readers make better-informed biotech investing decisions. For me, that often meant calling bullshit, which caused some people to love me, others to hate me. [I have 1,200 people blocked on Twitter!]”

Read more here.