Personal finance columnist: Cutting stock listings long overdue

Personal finance columnist Scott Burns took a buyout from the Dallas Morning News in 2006, but he continues to write his syndicated column while also working as the chief investment strategist at AssetBuilder Inc., an investment adviser.

Burns graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in humanities and biology. He began his newspaper career as a newspaper columnist at the Boston Herald in 1977 where he was also the financial editor. The column was nationally syndicated in 1981 and is now distributed by Universal Press. In 1985 he joined the staff of the Morning News where his column quickly became one of the most widely read features in the paper.

Talking Biz News recently caught up with Burns and talked to him about what he thinks about the current state of business journalism and where it’s headed. What follows is an edited transcript.

How did you get interested in writing about personal finance?

As a child I went from sharing a rented room with my single parent mother to being a millionaire’s stepson. It made me very curious about people and money.

What did you like about business journalism?

It focuses on verbs rather than adjectives. It’s the language of human action.

How did business journalism change during your career?

Access to financial information and research data increased incredibly with the Internet and the Web. In the ’70s you could spend an entire day getting a few scraps of information from, say, the business branch of Boston Public Library. Today you can be buried in information in a few clicks.

Access changed in the same way for the general public. As a result, the value premium for being able to synthesize and frame issues has increased.

Why did you decide to leave the Morning News?

Three reasons: 1.) Long ago I vowed to live my work life so that my employer would worry about how to keep me, rather than how to get rid of me. In the current environment that is impossible. 2.) We had been financially prepared for several years, largely because I do what I recommend in my columns. 3.) I was confident that I had plenty of interesting work in hand — such as finishing “Spend Til’ the Endâ€? with Larry Kotlikoff. The book, which Simon & Schuster is releasing in June, presents a serious challenge to conventional financial planning.

What I didn’t know was that the day I made the decision to leave, friends would say, “Let’s start AssetBuilder� that night over dinner.

What do you miss about full-time business journalism?

I did enjoy being part of a large organization that communicated the full human condition. I was proud to be at the Boston Herald when Stanley Forman won one of his Pulitzers for his pictures. I was just as proud to be at the Dallas Morning News for the Pulitzers there.

But moving from being a full-time observer to being an actual action figure — to creating new offers and possibilities with a small team of people — is even better.

How is your current work similar to what you were doing at the Morning News?

My primary task is the same: communicating. Today, I’m doing more of it on the Web through our reader forums. This is very demanding but it’s also very exciting — there’s a much greater sense of contact and immediacy.

You’re still writing your syndicated column. How hard is it to continue writing and work as an investment adviser?

It’s not a problem. I’ve been managing money for a handful of friends for over a decade. I always thought the experience was very useful, just as I thought having been a corporate director was very useful. It’s one thing to write about investing money, it’s another thing to actually do it. When I was mostly a journalist, managing money improved my understanding and writing. That’s what it does today.

Of course, I couldn’t say this if I was trying to accumulate positions in obscure stocks. But I’m an index investor, not a stock picker, so none of the usual conflicts have much bearing. There is no chance that I would ever make any money by buying, say, an emerging market ETF and then writing about it.

Are there any ethical issues that you’ve faced by wearing both hats?

None yet. I write for the self-directed investor. I never mention AssetBuilder in the column.

What do you think about what’s going on now with daily business sections cutting back on stock listings and some papers cutting their standalone sections?

Cutting back on stock listings is overdue by decades. Back in the early ’80s, when I was business editor at the Boston Herald American, I wanted to use computers to give readers more information on less newsprint. I wrote the code to do it. I took the idea and paste-up samples of my “Unified Stock Exchangeâ€? to Associated Press and got looks of non-comprehension. Ditto the publisher of the Boston Herald American. But the reality is that newspapers are a poor source for pricing information today and have been for many, many years.

By the way, I had my “Unified Stock Exchange� framed and it now hangs on my office wall at AssetBuilder, a reminder to avoid being on the Bleeding Edge.

What do you think business and personal finance journalism will need to do to survive in the changing media world?

It will continue doing what it has already done — focus on the mobility, ability and adaptability of individuals and small teams. We’ll have more churn in publication titles but we’ll also have a lot more offerings. We are no longer bound by the habits and conventions of newspapers/print media.

Today we have more freedom than ever before to say, “Let’s go for it!�

Anything else on your mind about the state of business journalism today?

As much as I love newspapers, they are hamstrung by their attachment to a business model that no longer works. The longer management views them as “propertiesâ€? — rather than collections of talent awaiting redeployment — the greater the danger career journalists face.