The biz reporter who finds scandals at business schools

Susan Snyder of The Philadelphia Inquirer profiled business journalist John A. Byrne, whose coverage at Poets & Quants led to the college rankings scandal at Temple University’s business school.

Snyder writes, “A native of Paterson, N.J., Byrne worked for several newspapers and magazines, including Forbes, Fast Company, and Businessweek, where he eventually rose to executive editor. Byrne left and started Poets & Quants, which now gets more than 40 million page views annually with 35% of its traffic from overseas, Byrne said.

“With a full-time staff of 17, the website and the four others he runs at C-Change Media have done some hard-hitting reporting, including breaking a story on the former dean of Stanford’s business school, who was having an affair with a professor who was married to a colleague at the school. The dean subsequently resigned. The site also looked critically at why Harvard Business School had failed to increase the number of Black faculty and students.

“On the witness stand, Byrne testified about Temple’s rise in rankings and the time he visited Fox and met with Porat and his team.

“Porat invited him after he wrote that Temple was an unexpected winner in rankings. Typically when visiting colleges, Byrne would interview faculty and students separately and then meet with the dean for a while. In this case, he sat at a large table with Porat and his team, and Porat called on people ‘like it was a carnival,’ he said. Because the visit was so ‘scripted,’ he didn’t write anything, he said.”

Read more here.