WSJ’s Herman wins Elliott Bell Award from NYFWA

Wall Street Journal tax columnist Tom Herman is this year’s Elliott V. Bell Award winner from the New York Financial Writer’s Association.

Named for the first president of the NYFWA, the Elliott V. Bell Award recognizes an individual’s lifetime contributions to the field of financial journalism.

In his 40 years at the Wall Street Journal, Herman’s coverage of taxes and his ability to demystify the code for millions of Americans helped make him a legend and a stalwart in the newsroom. More recently, Herman has been passing on his knowledge of financial journalism to the next generation of writers as a teacher at Yale and Columbia Journalism School.

He joined the staff directly after graduating from college in 1968 and was based in several Journal bureaus, including New York, Atlanta, Hong Kong and Singapore. He covered the credit markets for about a decade and started the Journal’s semi-annual interest rate and economic outlook survey in 1981. From mid-1993 to 2009, he wrote a weekly column on taxes. He still writes a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal Sunday.

Following the Elliott V. Bell presentation on June 18 at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, the evening will continue with a panel titled “Waking America from its Tax Nightmare, and the Consequences of Failure for our Economy and Democracy,” which will be moderated by Peter Coy, economics editor for Bloomberg Businessweek. Coy writes about a range of domestic and international issues and is a regular contributor to the magazine’s Opening Remarks Column.

Bell was a former Business Week editor. (Photo by Steve Govoni)