Photo by Danny Rosenthal Writing About Business: The New Columbia Knight-Bagehot Guide to Economics and Business Journalism written by alumni of the Knight-Bagehot Program and edited by Terri Thompson is now available from Barnes and Noble. |
About Terri Thompson www.columbia.edu/~tat5/ · Director, Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism, Columbia Graduate School of Journalism · Director, The Reuters Forum · Business journalist · Book author and editor · Amateur photographer and musician |
Born
in California
and raised in a small town in Iowa, Terri Thompson kept moving east
and never looked back. God probably intended for her to become a gospel
singer; instead she became a business journalist. She
started her so-called career at the Coralville (Iowa) Courier, a weekly newspaper in suburban Iowa City
whose banner read, “If it didn’t happen by Wednesday, it didn’t happen
this week.” She moved to Boston in 1974 where she was hired to be
secretary for the publisher of Purchasing
Magazine, a bi-weekly trade magazine published by Cahners Publishing.
It didn’t take long for her boss to realize that Terri was not cut
out to be a secretary, so she was demoted to Assistant News Editor
and wrote about labor and economics – topics about which she knew
relatively nothing. Terri
got her lucky break in 1980 when Columbia Graduate School of Journalism
awarded her a Walter F. Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business
Journalism. As a Bagehot Fellow, she took graduate level courses at
Columbia Business School and learned all she needed to know about
labor and economics, as well as accounting, corporate finance, the
money markets and where to get a good hamburger on Manhattan’s Upper
West Side. Armed
with a decent education, she was hired out of Columbia to work for
Business Week, where she
covered everything from corporate finance, real estate and personal
finance to energy. During her 20 years as a business journalist, she
also has written or edited for Institutional
Investor, U.S. News & World Report, Lear’s, Working Woman, Adweek,
Corporate Finance and Treasury
& Risk Management. While
on maternity leave from U.S. News, Terri was approached by Columbia J-School and invited to
direct the very program that had changed her life. Renamed the Knight-Bagehot
Fellowship, it is still the most prestigious mid-career program for
business journalists and Terri is driven to keep it financially sound
and academically rigorous. She says it’s more fun to be the Director
of the program than one of its Fellows because she doesn’t have to
take all those exams, yet she gets to hang out with some of the finest
journalists in the country. Over
the years, Terri has won a bunch of journalism awards and has belonged
to numerous professional organizations, including the New York Financial
Writers’ Association which she served as President in 1995-1996. She
is the author of Biz Kids’ Guide
to Success: Money-Making Ideas for Young Entrepreneurs (Barron’s
Educational Series, 1992) and the editor of Writing
About Business: The New Columbia Knight-Bagehot Guide to Economics
and Business Journalism (Columbia University Press, 2000) which
can be bought from any online bookstore, such as Barnes
and Noble or Amazon. Terri's husband, Peter Rosenthal, died after a long illness in September, 2001. Mother to Daniel Rosenthal, Terri now spends much of her time caring for her son, making music, taking pictures and trying to be a good citizen. She thanks God for bringing her where she is and for taking her where she’s going.
Updated on August 14, 2003 |