NYT’s Sorkin on how he got his beat

Shefali Luthra of the Brown University Daily Herald interviewed New York Times business journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin on how he got his job and how he became an expert in covering Wall Street and finance.

Here is an excerpt:

Herald: And did you always know you wanted to be a journalist?

Sorkin: I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a journalist. I always knew I was fascinated by media. I used to watch ridiculous amounts of television — my mother used to try to turn the TV off. And I read the New York Times. It was almost religious in terms of rushing to get the paper in the morning back in high school. So, yeah, I don’t know if I wanted to be a journalist immediately, but I definitely think that that experience was obviously what set the whole course for the rest of my career, and I got the bug pretty quickly.

Herald: And then how did you move to finance?

Sorkin: Finance was a bit of a luck out. I started originally working for Stuart Elliott, who was the advertising columnist which was in the business and finance section. So I knew a lot of the finance editors and all of that. And it really was what happened in my junior year and when I graduated, which was I was asked to write about British business. And that was sort of my initial role was writing about, you know, the business world in the UK. And then, you know, what really happened was 1999 was sort of the peak of the mergers and acquisitions boom, and so all of a sudden I was covering the world of deal-making and Wall Street and all these high-flying people and things.

Read more here.