San Diego loses its most prominent business journalist

Don Bauder, longtime business journalist for the San Diego Union-Tribune and the San Diego Reader, is retiring at the age of 82.

Ken Stone of the Times of San Diego writes, “His former colleagues at The San Diego Union-Tribune are unanimous in praise of his San Diego career, starting as a $18,000-a-year business editor in 1973.

“Dean Calbreath, who helped the U-T win a Pulitzer Prize for Rep. ‘Duke’ Cunningham coverage, said it was wonderful to watch Bauder track down a scam artist.

“‘He’d sometimes pace the room, while waiting for faxes, emails or phone calls that would give him the evidence he needed to hammer the nails into the coffin of a scammer,’ Calbreath said. ‘And the closer he got, the more excited he became, punctuating the air with exclamations of ‘I think we’ve got him!”

“Fellow U-T business writer Craig Rose called Bauder a ‘brilliant freak of nature absolutely born to do journalism.’

“‘If anyone lives closer to the credo, ‘Afflict the comfortable,’ I haven’t met ’em,’ Rose said. ‘He saves his ire for the weight classes above him — the fraudsters, stock market swindlers and ‘legal thieves’ — a concept Don teaches to all — that largely get a pass from our criminal justice system.'”

Read more here.