How CNBC’s Epperson got into business journalism

So Money podcaster Farnoosh Torabi interviewed CNBC personal finance correspondent Sharon Epperson about her job and her beat.

Here is an excerpt:

FT: Then transitioning into business journalism, was that a no brainer? For me I think I just, I majored in finance so it seemed like a natural progression of my studies, but I don’t think anyone wakes up going, “I can’t wait to be a financial journalist!”

SE: Well, it’s not a natural progression for a sociologist, right, who took EC 10 at Harvard under the [inaudible] that we had to and I was really scared and had to get a tutor, supply and demand was not something that came straight to my mind as something that made sense, but of course it makes perfect sense now. I think that, again it’s telling a good story, but telling the money angle of it. And as the first internship I had at The Wall Street Journal, my bureau chief told me, “Every story comes down to numbers often. And you just follow the money and you can tell a great story.” And so that’s kind of how I fell into it.

I did a couple of business stories for the local paper when I was an intern at the Pittsburgh Press. I did an internship at The Wall Street Journal because I happen to meet someone who was an intern at The Wall Street Journal one summer and she said, “Come meet my bureau chief,” and I just thought it would be a great opportunity to work for the Journal locally in Pittsburgh. But it wasn’t because I had such an interest in business news, and even though technology was really starting to take hold in Pittsburgh and the steel industry was dying down, there were a lot of interesting business stories to tell. But the stories I did were education stories and other types of stories that just kind of had maybe a business angle to them or there was some private-public partnership going on and I was covering that.

And then finally when I got out of college and out of grad school and started working as a journalist, I was working at Time magazine. And there I was a general assignment reporter and I was really kind of intimidated by Wall Street and business news and the coverage that I was kind of required to look into as a New York correspondent.

But I did find one story that was my kind of business story and it was a story about a philanthropist in New York who had worked all of her life at the IRS, made very little money in terms of her income but was an extremely savvy investor, investing in everything that she really was interested in and consumer products, media and film. And she ended up amassing millions of dollars and then giving it all away to a university that she never attended but wished that she could have. And I just found that to be a fascinating story, it got a lot of attention in Time Magazine, and it was the one clip that I could show around to people when I was out looking for other opportunities.

To listen to the rest of the interview, go here.