From child actor to finance reporter

Grace O’Connell-Joshua of Insider spoke with finance reporter Reed Alexander, who was a child actor, about his career change.

Here is an excerpt:

Do you feel like your past career in acting prepared you for your career in reporting? If so, how? 

Most definitely. Acting is such a human endeavor — understanding people’s motivations and what makes them think the way they do. Plus, as an industry, entertainment is a very social space. Those are skills that really benefit you as a journalist.

Some of the basic training that comes with acting — like knowing how to memorize lines, communicate with an audience, hold your own in front of a camera, and project confidence — is extremely helpful in a journalistic context, too.

You cover investment banks, and in particular, young Wall Street. For those of us who are unfamiliar with the financial world, what exactly does that mean?

I think of investment banks like the mouths of the river in finance.

They offer companies a variety of services, like helping them to raise money or go public, buy and sell other companies, or even sell themselves to larger acquirers. The work they do can help generate massive numbers of jobs or unleash the capital for companies to invest in growth initiatives that can ripple throughout the global economy.

For me, covering investment banks means getting to know their people — everyone from senior dealmakers down to the most junior of staff, like entry-level analysts or interns. My banking coverage runs the gamut from painting pictures of the powerful people in charge, to exploring how they hammer out megadeals in the tens of billions of dollars, to looking at whether their HR initiatives to diversify firms’ ranks are having a positive impact.

Read more here.