From a romance novel to business journalism

Fox Business Network’s Tracy Byrnes talked with the Opportunist magazine’s managing editor Leslie Stone about her path to business journalism.

Here is an excerpt:

Opportunist: How did you go from a Big Four accounting firm like Ernst & Young to broadcast journalism?

Tracy Byrnes: Wow, that’s a lifetime and a bottle of wine long. [Laughs] I always wanted to be a writer. I took fiction-writing classes at night and even tried to write a dumb romance novel. All the publishers I approached basically told me, ‘Don’t quit your day job.’ Then I stumbled upon nonfiction and discovered I was pretty good at it. Financial World magazine, which is now defunct, gave me my first writing gig. Three months after I got there, they decided to quit publishing. But it was a weird blessing because Jim Cramer was starting TheStreet.com on the Internet. I was his eleventh hire. That’s where I met Dagen McDowell, who to this day is one of my good friends at Fox. I left TheStreet.com when I got pregnant and was doing some freelancing for The Wall Street Journal and The New York Post when someone said ‘Let me put you on air to talk about an article you wrote.’

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