Why MarketWatch.com wishes it wasn’t a Loeb finalist

Jeremy Olshan, the editor of MarketWatch.com, writes Thursday that the financial news website wishes its coverage of student loan debt was not a finalist for a Gerald Loeb Award.

Olshan writes, “It’s not that Jillian Berman isn’t worthy: Her coverage of America’s student-loan crisis, and the surprising ways this $1 trillion debt burden has repercussions across the economy, has been important and terrific. She and her editor, Angela Moore, should be proud. (We’ve collected a selection of her stories from last year, which are posted further down.)

“But as we watch smiling college graduates step off the stage with their diplomas this month into a financial quicksand — from which there is limited social mobility — it’s hard not to wish we never had to hire a student-loan reporter in the first place.

“‘I spent four years prostate to the higher mind, got my paper,’ the Indigo Girls sang in 1989. ‘And I was free.’ Today’s college graduates often aren’t free. They’re akin to indentured servants, as Dissent Magazine put it.

“There will always be a need for crime reporters. There will always be political and financial scandals to write about. But with luck, Jillian won’t have to cover student loans for long. As problems go, this one seems solvable.”

Read more here.