How Rebecca Jarvis got her start in business journalism

Maggie Loughran of The Chicago Maroon interviewed ABC News business and technology correspondent Rebecca Jarvis about her career.

Here is an excerpt:

CM: Did you start out in print journalism and then go to broadcasting?

RJ: I started out writing for  Crain’s Chicago Business , and a magazine that’s no longer around called  Business 2.0 .

When I was in college,  Business 2.0  had offered me an internship but I ended up taking instead an offer in London with Citi. So I circled back around with the people who had offered me the internship in college and said, “I would love to write for you—freelance, whatever,” and I pitched them some ideas and started writing freelance for them and also pitched a number of ideas to  Crain’s  and started writing for them.

One of the very first articles, this was 2005, I had pitched to  Crain’s  was—when I was in investment banking I had seen all of these companies taking on more and more debt—and so the article was all about why companies were taking on so much debt and how banks were allowing companies to take on more and more debt that was known as covenant-free or covenant-light, meaning they didn’t have restrictions on them and they could really—they were able to borrow more money than ever before and they were able to do it without having to live up to standards that had been in place years before.

In 2005 it was kind of the beginning of the—people can argue about when the actual beginning of the housing bubble was, and the debt bubble—but really, the Great Recession was caused in large part by people in all facets taking on too much debt. The housing crisis is the biggest part of it that we all know. There was just way too much leverage in the system.

Read more here.