Longtime business journalist Jelter dies from cancer

Business journalist Jim Jelter died Wednesday morning in his native Walnut Creek, Calif., at home with family after battling cancer.

Jelter was deputy investing/corporate news editor for MarketWatch.com based in San Francisco, a position he held for more than a decade.

The investing/corporate news team reports on more than 150 companies, including some of the world’s biggest. Jelter previously spent two decades at Reuters in Europe and North America, running the energy desk and directing specialized coverage of the energy-trading business.

He is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and has a wife and two sons.

“Jim embodied the spirit of the Golden State in manner and dress, laid-back and intelligent and with the right mind-set,” said former MarketWatch colleague Anthony Lazarus in an email to Talking Biz News. “He lived as one of the great editors and writers that led myself and others to keep at our trade. I don’t think I can better say how much he was respected and how we will miss him so.”

Jelter was interested in a number of topics, from travel and globalism and relationships. He kept a vintage MG in car-show condition and drank Manhattans on the rocks.

David Callaway, now editor of USA Today, hired Jelter in 2004 when he was editor of MarketWatch.

“Jim was a journalist in every sense of the word,” said Callaway in an email to Talking Biz News. “Gentleman. Rogue. Story-teller. Friend. His was the spirit of MarketWatch. A huge loss.”

Jelter, longtime MarketWatch creative director Jomo Moir and Lazarus would often keep each other company at the marble bar of Perbacco, on the city’s California Street, after work.

“He’d tell us about walking for hours in the Oslo winter trying to find a grocer who could special-order … artichokes,” said Lazarus.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.