Longtime biz journalist McCune retiring after 43 years

Longtime business journalist Greg McCune is retiring from the Associated Press after 43 years in the business.

He has been at the AP for the past five years.

“I intend to take some time to kick back with a glass of wine to toast a great run with my wife of 36 years, Pat,” said McCune in an email. “We are retiring to Manhattan, Kansas (the Little Apple) to be near both our extended families. I may eventually dabble in writing if inspiration strikes and might also look to teach the odd journalism course. As you know I was an adjunct at Medill.”

He started his career in 1976 as a reporter on grain markets at the Kansas City Board of Trade working for what was then called Commodity News Services (CNS), later Knight-Ridder Financial News and finally Bridge News before it went out of business. He transferred with them as a commodity/financial markets reporter to Chicago, Sydney, Australia, and Washington over a span of eight years. He moved to Reuters as a reporter on agriculture and trade policy in 1984.

“I was fortunate to have a tremendous career with Reuters,” said McCune. “From Washington I moved to London covering commodity and financial markets, then Brussels covering the monetary negotiations that created the Euro, then Canada as chief correspondent based in Toronto and then back to Washington as Reuters bureau chief during the Clinton administration. I finally settled down in one place in Chicago first as Midwest bureau chief, then as a Reuters training editor for the Americas and finally as Midwest general news editor.”

He left Reuters at the end of 2013 and joined the AP in 2014.

“The favorite story of my career was covering the negotiations to create a single currency in Europe from 1988 to 1992,” he said. “With 20/20 hindsight, those negotiations created a monetary regime modeled on the restrictive, anti inflationary German system that sowed the seeds EU crises later with Brexit and Greece’s financial meltdown.”

He served on the SABEW board for six years and was president from 2009-10 during the move to Phoenix.

“It was terrible year for business journalism amid the Great Recession hemorrhaging newspaper jobs and with our profession under attack for supposedly failing to warn the world that a financial crisis loomed,” said McCune. “I was frankly happy that we kept SABEW afloat amid the crisis. Our annual conference that year was in Denver just after the Rocky Mountain News closed, a red flag if ever there was one. But I’m proud that SABEW is now flourishing and grateful to my successors for making that happen.”

He can be reached at gregamccune@gmail.com.