Categories: OLD Media Moves

This biz reporter has gone to pot

Dow Jones Newswires columnist Al Lewis writes Thursday about business journalist Chris Walsh, who worked for the Colorado Springs Gazette and the Rocky Mountain News before finding a job as editor of the Medical Marijuana Business Daily.

Lewis writes, “I know what you are thinking: Did he have to fail a drug test to get this job?

“‘People … ask if I now have an uninterrupted, free supply of marijuana that I can share with them,’ he said, ‘and they are dead serious.’

“He swears he does not sample the merchandise. He does not write product reviews. Dope is simply the beat he covers. ‘I’ve covered lots of things that I haven’t done,’ he said. ‘I’ve covered airlines, but I’ve never flown a plane.’

“Walsh is close to finishing his MBA at Regis University. I know him well enough to assure you he is about as clean-cut a guy as you can find in this gritty profession we share. His only weakness is that he looks more like a cop than a business reporter, which can work to his detriment.

“During a meeting he once attended with some marijuana business people, ‘one person pulled me aside and said, ‘You better not be a federal agent,” said. ‘They thought this whole thing was a front. They thought I was the FBI or something. It was very odd.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.