Hobart Rowen

1966 – Washington Post hires Hobart Rowen from Newsweek to improve its business and economics coverage.

One of the newspapers making major efforts to improve their business coverage in the 1960s included The Washington Post, which hired Hobart Rowen from Newsweek in 1966 to beef up its business reporting. Rowen had started at the Journal of Commerce in 1938 and moved in 1944 to Newsweek, where he wrote a page called “Business Trends” and later started a syndicated economics column. While deputy managing editor of finance from 1966 to 1975, he increased the Post’s business desk from four to 30 members and boosted its coverage from three columns a day to more than 20 columns.

Another newspaper that pushed to improve its business coverage in the 1960s was the Los Angeles Times. In 1968, it hired John Lawrence away from TheWall Street Journal to be its financial editor. He separated the business section from the sports section, making the newspaper one of the first with a stand-alone business section, and Lawrence also pushed for placing business stories on the front page of the newspaper. One of Lawrence ’s early hires was Paul Steiger, who later became managing editor of The Journal.

Time May 1966

 

Another paper that had dramatically improved its business coverage in the 1960s was the New York Herald Tribune. Financial editor Myron Kandel believed that “the public interest was substantially affected by the activities of private commerce, which ought not to be exempt from the inquiring eyes of the press.” Among the reporters he brought in was Dan Dorfman, whose investigative reporting would become well-known in business journalism for the next 30 years. One of the major pushes that Kandel made in the paper’s business coverage was to obtain an opposite side to the story from competitors, former employees, stock traders, analysts and other sources.


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