Ryan Chittum of the Columbia Journalism Review spoke with Fortune‘s Carol Loomis, who recently retired from full-time writing at the business magazine after 60+ years. One of the highlights is Loomis discussing how her famous stories about derivatives originated.
Here is an excerpt:
CL: There were actually two of them. One in 1994 and one in 1995, both of them cover stories, and there’s no way of writing in a short fashion about derivatives. Particularly not when they’re brand new and people are trying to understand them for the first time, and you must have a generous supply of words to deal with that. You need room to handle the bigness of the subject.
TA: What impressed me about those stories was how prescient they were 13 or 14 years before the financial crisis. And that’s true for a lot of your stories going back as long as you’ve been writing.
CL: Some of it is luck. I remember on the first derivatives story, one of our editors Julie Connelly, said, “Carol, you ought to write about derivatives,” and I remember shrinking in horror. The Fortune way was that the great stories come out of a good subject and a writer who enthusiastically wants to cover that subject. And so, almost never, are you told you must do a story at Fortune. Almost never.
This editor and my managing editor at the time, who was Marshall Loeb, convinced me that (derivatives) was a subject that I should take on. And one of my failings is that I tend to get very interested in subjects if I go into them. That accounts for the messiness of my office, because I never forget my interest in those subjects. I got into derivatives and as I began to understand them I found them fascinating. I began to develop sort of a concept of how to write about them.
And I’ve always had the ability—and this is very important—to call up the smartest investor, definitely, and probably the smartest guy in the country, Warren Buffett, and say, “Guess what I’m going to do derivatives. You have any thoughts on this?” And I have benefited greatly from having Warren suggest a few things to me over the years.
Read more here.
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