Wall Street columnist Weidner leaving MarketWatch.com

David Weidner, the Wall Street columnist at MarketWatch.com, is leaving the website. His last day at Dow Jones is July 30.

In an email to friends and colleagues, Weidner wrote:

Wanted to let you know first, after 12 years at MarketWatch including five at The Wall Street Journal, I am leaving. My column, “Writing on the Wall,” which ran from 2005 to 2015 is ending. The final column will appear tomorrow.

In his goodbye column, which will appear tomorrow, Weidner writes:

Make no mistake. I’m not delusional. The end of Writing on the Wall isn’t going to change your life. Better columns have come and gone. And MarketWatch has a fantastic stable of columnists and contributors including my favorites Brett Arends, Rex Nutting and Terese Poletti.
WOTW could have kept going, grinding on and grasping for more page views with lists and teaser headlines. Financial journalism has changed during these nine years. Charts are pretty hot right now. I wish I could write this piece in a Venn diagram with a heat map of the U.S. Beyond that, there are more voices and choices than ever. That’s good.
There’s also what former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Steiger described as “a blizzard of garbage” out there too. That’s not good.

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.