From copy machines to top business journalist

Alex Schiff of Benzinga interviewed New York Times financial reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin, who writes a weekly column and also oversees its popular Dealbook blog.

Here is an excerpt:

Now it’s no hiding the fact that you’re one of the youngest people around cited as an authority on Wall Street, economics, etc and that’s in a leadership position of such a major media outlet. Could you talk a little about that rapid ascension and what you think brought you to where you are today?

I started here when I was 18 years old as an intern if you will, and I used to Xerox and staple. I had no intention of putting two words together, let alone a sentence. I got lucky very early on; an editor who didn’t know how old I was assigned me a story to write, and didn’t realize I was still in high school.

I’ve been doing this now for way over a decade, and when I graduated from school, I moved over to London, and the New York Times gave me a job out there where I covered mergers and acquisitions. This was during the M&A bubble around 1999, so it was really a trial by fire and a remarkable education. I moved back to the states in 2001, and one of the first things I did when I got back here was to start this thing called Dealbook, which was this email I used to send at 7 AM. I’d send it out to bankers, CEOs, hedge fund managers, and it really just grew. In the first year we had 30,000 readers, then 80,000, to over 200,000 getting the email every morning. Now we have the website, which gets over 2+ million people on it. It’s been a remarkable little ride over the past few years.

Read more here.