David Oyama of The Wall Street Journal corporate news desk sent out the following to the news staff on Wednesday:
I’ve read a lot of these notes over the years, and now it’s my turn to say thanks and farewell on my last day for the privilege of working with you for more than 20 years at the Journal.
The landscape of The Wall Street Journal has changed dramatically in that time. When I arrived in 1993, globalization was the buzz word, and many thought it remarkable that our European and Asian editions were edited mainly in New York. A company called AOL was bringing Internet service to many homes for the first time, and Dow Jones still had high hopes in an electronic financial-data provider called Telerate. Mobile phones couldn’t be put in one’s pocket and didn’t do much more than make calls.
Thirty years before that, I was a college summer intern at the Chicago Daily News under a Dow Jones Newspaper Fund grant. I was able to cover organized-crime bombings of restaurants, watch the best litigators argue in federal court and a few summers later follow Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s open-housing campaign in Chicago. Some of my peers were heading to reporting assignments in Vietnam.
I took some detours from journalism into college teaching, Asian American community work and the New York theater before returning to journalism. My wife and I raised two wonderful daughters, now both lawyers with a commitment to public service.
As Heraclitus said long ago, “No man ever steps in the same river twice.” But some things endure. There will always be journalists who won’t settle for less than knowing and reporting the whole story and who recognize that part of the greatness of American journalism is that it is, in some measure, a public trust.
I bid you all a fond farewell, and wish the greatest success for this now nearly 125-year-old enterprise called The Wall Street Journal.
In an email to Talking Biz News, Oyama wrote, “I’m basically retiring and have no set plans other than to let the projects that mean most to me assert themselves while I undertake the remake that our apartment has needed for almost as long as I’ve been at the Journal.”
