Lawrence, longtime biz journalist, dies at 75

Steve Lawrence, who worked in business journalism positions for the New York Daily News, New York Times, Forbes and Financial Times in Canada, has died at the age of 75.

Fred Langan of The Globe and Mail writes, “He graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara and then earned a master’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University, in Evanston, Ill. He worked as a news writer at a talk radio station for a while then moved to New York to study law. He dropped out to work for the New York Post, then moved to the city’s other tabloid, the New York Daily News, as its consumer affairs reporter.

“Mr. Lawrence then moved to the New York Times, where was a business editor. He kept moving, finding one exciting job after another, working for Time Inc., then as an editor at Forbes Magazine, where he stayed for six years.

“‘Steve had a great eye for stories and a particularly deft touch in sprucing up ledes [newspaper-speak for the first sentence in a story],’ Rex Seline wrote in an e-mail. He worked with Mr. Lawrence in Dallas and New York. ‘He radiated energy, which spread throughout the newsroom. In fact, it was almost magnetic.’

“In 1991, Mr. Lawrence moved to the Financial Times in Toronto, where he worked for about a year. Mr. Lawrence then started working as a roving ‘quality control’ editor of the string of smaller papers then owned by Thomson. (The Financial Times of Canada eventually folded in 1995.)”

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