Sloan on Sloan

Allan Sloan, the Newsweek Wall Street editor who announced last week he was leaving to work for Fortune magazine, said Monday that the decision was partly based on working with an old colleague and the demand for high-end business journalism caused by the launches of Portfolio magazine and Fox Business News.

“I’m just excited about the chance to be with a lot of people who care about this stuff,” said Sloan, speaking to a group of business journalists at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual conference.

Sloan said he wanted to work again with Hank Gilman, now deputy managing editor at Fortune and formerly the business editor at Newsweek. As part of his deal, the Washington Post will continue to run his column.

He also noted that business publications in New York such as Forbes, Fortune, BusinessWeek and The Wall Street Journal “are thinking they have to do something” in the wake of high-profile hires by Conde Nast Portfolio, a new business magazine that launched earlier this year, and the fall launch of the Fox Business channel.

Sloan, who has been at Newsweek for 12 years, is a six-time winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award, business journalism’s highest honor, and has also won numerous awards and honors during his 35-year business journalism career. In 2001, he received both the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for business and financial journalism, and the Distinguished Achievement Award from SABEW.

Sloan also spoke about his column writing and his career. In a handout given to SABEW attendees, Sloan wrote, “One of the joys of being a business writer is that the world produces documents for us. Documents never give you lip and don’t complain if you hunt them up outside of normal business hours. And I’ve never known a document to call my boss and complain it was misquoted.”

Later, when discussing good column writing, he added, “It’s a question of finding the story, then writing it in a language approaching English. It helps to have intelligent editing, which was the case in all of these [examples], and to have an art department that picks up on the spirit of what you’re trying to do.”