Leonhardt’s success is due to intellectual curiosity

Andrew Damstedt of American Journalism Review profiles David Leonhardt of the New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize-winning business columnist who is becoming the paper’s Washington bureau chief.

Damstedt writes, “Ingrassia says one of the reasons he picked Leonhardt as a columnist was that he wasn’t sure precisely what he was going to get each week. ‘That’s a great value in a columnist,’ Ingrassia says. ‘I want to be surprised by a columnist, by the choice of their topic, their reasoning, their writing. And not pick it up and say, ‘I know what this person is going to say before I read it,’ because then why should I read it?’

“Ingrassia cites Leonhardt’s intellectual curiosity as one of the reasons he’s so successful. ‘He knows what he doesn’t know,’ Ingrassia says. ‘He doesn’t try to wing it. He doesn’t try to bullshit.’

“A self-proclaimed Leonhardt fan is Times Assistant Business Editor Phyllis Messenger, who helped edit his columns weekly before the last one, ‘Lessons From the Malaise,’ ran on July 26.

“‘Each week was a different kind of thing. I felt like I would be going to school and learning something new every week because David had thoroughly researched it,’ Messenger says. ‘And plus he also had, which is unusual even now, umpteen links in his column that would show all the different places where he was getting his information from. I always felt like, even if he was sending the links after I had finished working on the story, it was always helpful to me in understanding more of the depth of what he was writing about. That’s sort of the nitty-gritty, and yet if you are a reader of his online, it’s a very rich experience.’

“Messenger mentioned Leonhardt’s columns about renting versus buying and his idea to include an online calculator to help people figure out which was the smarter option for them. Rudoren says people frequently ask him for advice on whether they should rent or buy when they are moving to a new venue.”

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