How Neil Cavuto got into business journalism

Dean Rotbart of Business News Luminaries spoke with Neil Cavuto of Fox Business Network about his career.

Here is an excerpt:

Rotbart: I’m curious, what was your big break when it came to your career?

Cavuto: Well, you’re very nice, but I don’t know. I mean, they all in a different way, gave me an opportunity to do and broadcasting what I was doing in print. I’d worked for a magazine for a while called Pensions and Investment Age in Washington. I had written for Indianapolis Star and News. And I was always interested in doing business stories and the like. Timing was kind of everything in my career when I started in the early ’80s, that was the beginning of the Reagan boom. And if you think about it, everything opened up from there, whether you’re for or against him, he was changing the world as we knew it, and people who were up on what he was doing with the budget, what he was doing with taxes, what he was doing with new priorities, and started not only an economic but a market boom.

And I was the guy who had the quasi-skill set to cover it, and it was fascinating to be there. But you know, getting a chance to do anything in broadcasting that involved business, that was a very tough sell, even early on for a show like a Nightly Business Report, where while it was very centered on the markets and all of that, you had to be aware that it was going to be a broadcast. And so it couldn’t be wonked down to the point like you were going to be a walking Wall Street Journal.

There was a fear then that television offerings on a business were under much greater pressure than print offerings, because the Nightly Business Report had its sponsorship and everything else, and you had to keep that in mind. In other words, you couldn’t go too far.

To listen, go here.