Gasparino on getting on TV

Charles Gasparino

Christopher Paper of New York Resident magazine interviewed Fox Business Network reporter Chalres Gasparino about his career.

Here is an excerpt:

NYR: You started off in print journalism; how did you make the transition to television?

CG: I started off in Tampa and I hated it. So, I came back to New York and worked in trade publications covering financial news. Then I got a job at Newsday covering the finance side of City Hall; got enough good stories that the Wall Street Journal hired me. I spent about ten years there. While I was there they had a deal with CNBC where they would use the talent on air. I never did it; I thought it was bullshit. I thought TV was marginalizing news.

Then I was breaking all of these stories on Elliot Spitzer; I was the first guy to do in-depth pieces on the guy. I gave him his first big case – the Henry Blodget case came from my reporting. The Wall Street Journal was unimpressed with the Spitzer stuff at first and they wouldn’t put my work on page one. And the Journal back then was very competitive. You had to get a certain amount of page one stories every year, a certain amount of scoops, exclusives and there was something called a ten-point, which ran down the side of the page: it was the top forty most important stories of the paper and you competed to get in there. There were all these ways you were graded and if you failed they fired you. I was very competitive, but I couldn’t get any Spitzer story on the front page. But the wires loved the stories, and CNBC wanted me on, so I just started pitching it to them. They would have me on to talk about Spitzer, and I started to do much more of that. I then broke the story on Martha Stewart’s insider trading and that was TV heaven. And from a stint at Newsweek I ended up coming to Fox Business News Network two years ago.