Houston biz columnist says goodbye

Loren Steffy, the business columnist at the Houston Chronicle, says goodbye to his readers after nine years writing the column.

Steffy is joining a strategic communications firm with some of his former Bloomberg News colleagues.

Steffy writes, “More than nine years ago, when former Chronicle editor Jeff Cohen first discussed a column, he asked me how I would make mine different from the others out there.

“I told him I wanted to write a column that gave a voice to the voiceless constituents of the marketplace – investors, employees and consumers. Too often, their concerns are drowned out by the din and machinations of corporatespeak.

“We call this the business section, but that, too, is a holdover from a different era of journalism. What we really write about here is money and the people it affects.

“Following that flow of money led me to an incredible cast of characters over the years. I interviewed fishermen who live on the southern Louisiana island dubbed ‘The Bathtub’ in the Oscar-nominated film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild,’ and I joked about drinking Irish coffee with a Saudi mining executive in Riyadh.

“I talked to musician Robert Earl Keen about the pension plan he provides for his band. I interviewed spinach farmers in the Rio Grande Valley, cotton farmers in the Panhandle, and wildcatters from the familiar fields of West Texas to the untapped fields of eastern Turkey.

“I also found hubris, most notably in the testimony of fallen Enron executive Jeff Skilling at his 2006 trial, and heartbreak, in the stories of victims and survivors of disasters such as BP’s Texas City refinery explosion and the Deepwater Horizon disaster.”

Read more here.