On the billionaire beat

David Brauer of MinnPost.com writes about Erin Carlyle, a Forbes reporter recently hired to cover billionaires who previously spent some time as a reporter in Minneapolis.

Brauer writes, “Carlyle’s own path to the wealth beat is a good illustration that journalism isn’t a straight-line thing. She started at a tiny weekly in San Francisco’s bay area, lived in Costa Rica for a year, worked for a small California daily covering county government and triple murders, took a break as a psych researcher and Spanish teacher and Columbia University journalism grad-student, worked a few months at the Orange County Register covering immigration, then at CP for three years.

“How did she get the gig with no formal business-writing experience? ‘I think a lot of my skills ended up applying,’ Carlyle replies. ‘The Spanish-language skills, good basic reporting skills. I took business writing at Columbia and got honors in the course. Business reporting is still reporting, and I’d done a lot of document reporting at City Pages.’

“Although the term ‘reclusive’ has become nearly synonymous with ‘billionaire,’ Carlyle says the mega-wealthy are, like most groups, diverse: ‘There are those who don’t mind publicity and others who prefer not to speak to the press at all.'”

Read more here.