Categories: OLD Media Moves

McLean, Fabrikant named Reuters columnists

Well-known business journalists Bethany McLean and Geraldine Fabrikant will join Reuters as columnists, the news service announced Wednesday.

McLean is one of the world’s preeminent financial journalists. A math major who started her career as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs, she wrote articles for Fortune Magazine that hastened the demise of one of the biggest corporate frauds in history: Enron. Her first book, “The Smartest Guys In The Room” — co-written by Peter Elkind — became an Academy Award-nominated documentary.

A contributing editor at Vanity Fair, McLean is also co-author with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera of the recently published “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.” Her column for Reuters.com will focus on finance, both high and low.

As a media reporter for the New York Times, Fabrikant dominated her beat. She started at the paper in 1985 and has won six publishers award since that time. In 1996, she won the Loeb Award for deadline reporting.

Before joining The Times, Ms. Fabrikant had been the media editor for Business Week magazine since 1981. While there, she received an award for her cover story on the Capital Cities/ABC merger.

For Reuters, Fabrikant will put a human face on business, focusing on the bold-face names that behind who make the money world go round.

McLean and Fabrikant are the newest additions to op-ed editor James Ledbetter‘s increasingly influential stable of columnists.

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.

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View Comments

RickyT says:
September 28, 2011 at 3:03 pm
How do you know is stable is "increasingly influential"? Do we see more Reuters citations of columnists? Have the Reuters columns changed policy, gotten the wire service more chatter, won any prizes? You are putting the cart before the horse! Fact is, any work from Reuters is aimed first at its subscribers. Some of these new columnists' work may actually be read by fewer people than read them now (which si why I bet Bethany McLean is keeping her Vanity Fair gig too!)
- james ledbetter says:
  September 28, 2011 at 4:32 pm
  Rickyt, you're missing something critical: these columnists will run on reuters.com, a website with tens of millions of monthly readers--way more than, say, Vanity Fair has.
RickyT says:
September 28, 2011 at 4:40 pm
James, I'd put more stock in the attention paid Ms. McLean's articles by Vanity Fair subscribers than I would by the grazing web surfers who may come to Reuters.com for any number of reasons/searches.