Chris Welles

By MARK J. SCARP, SABEW Staff

PHOENIX, June 21, 2010 – Memorial services have been set for respected business journalist and educator Chris Welles, a recipient of the 1997 SABEW Distinguished Achievement Award who died early Saturday after an extended illness. He was 72.

Services will be July 10 at the First Unitarian Church, 50 Monroe Place, Brooklyn, N.Y., according to a message sent by Terri Thompson, Welles’ successor as head of the Knight-Bagehot business journalism program at Columbia University, to the program’s Board of Advisors. More information will be released as it becomes available.

Welles was presented with the award in recognition of his running the Knight-Bagehot program as well as his many years at the top of the business journalism profession.

Welles wrote for publications such as BusinessWeek and Life magazine.

He was also the author of “The Last Days of the Club,” what a February 1997 article in SABEW’s quarterly, The Business Journalist, said was a “classic book.”

The TBJ article also quoted James Gentry, then-dean of the University of Nevada-Reno journalism school, as saying Welles was best known for his clear writing and detailed reporting.

Andrew Leckey, president of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University, said Monday he recalled Welles as the “ultimate business journalist – incisive, eloquent, knowledgeable, disarming and curious all at the same time.”

Leckey was a Knight-Bagehot fellow when Welles ran the program.

“Those of us who benefited from his guidance early in our careers found him to be as comfortably engaged when discussing business intrigue with aspiring journalists as he was chatting with giants like Paul Volcker or John Kenneth Galbraith.”

Floyd Norris of the New York Times wrote Sunday that the Knight-Bagehot program Welles’ headed at Columbia from 1977 to 1985 offered midcareer journalists the change to spend a year at Columbia. Norris, as one of those who enrolled in the program, remained at Columbia to receive a master’s in business administration degree.

“Chris was less than overwhelmed when I applied for a spot as a fellow in 1981-’82, when I was a business writer at The Associated Press.  He put me on a waiting list, to be considered if a better applicant decided not to attend. One did so, and that proved to be the turning point of my career and life,” Norris wrote. “Chris taught me a lot about journalism and business, both while I was at Columbia and later on as a good friend.”

Norris called “the Last Days of the Club,” about the end of the fixed commission at the New York Stock Exchange in the mid-1970s, “one of the great books on Wall Street.”

Former SABEW board member Chris Roush, journalism professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, wrote Monday in his blog, Talking Business News, of the time when Welles was one of his editors at BusinessWeek in 1993 and 1994.

“I considered it a privilege to work for the man. He taught me so much about Wall Street and finance in a short time,” Roush wrote, also calling Welles “an in-house teacher of journalism excellence.”

According to Roush, Welles was business editor of the Saturday Evening Post, a contributing editor to Institutional Investor, a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and as an editor and writer for BusinessWeek. Roush reported that Welles’ awards included the Gerald Loeb, John Hancock, National Magazine Award and the University of Missouri business-writing award.

In the March 19 entry of his blog, Wide-Eyed Wonder, University of Nebraska journalism professor Joseph Weber said Welles “brought a skeptic’s eye to business. He wrote books about oil companies that rattled their cages so much that they shunned the Bagehot program, the mid-career biz-econ operation he ran at Columbia. He had a take-no-prisoners attitude toward business coverage, holding CEOs responsible for silliness and greed that got their companies in trouble.”

In the 1997 TBJ article, written by then-SABEW board member Charley Blaine, Henry Dubroff, then-editor of the Denver Business Journal, described Welles’ extraordinary talents.

“He can tell you in 10 minutes 90 percent of the stuff that’s in a proxy statement,” Dubroff was quoted as saying. “Give him 20 minutes, and he can show you the rudiments of an income statement and a balance sheet. In 30 minutes, he can deconstruct a front page story in The Wall Street Journal and tell you where it was on the mark and off the mark.”