Voting Runs April 12 – April 19
Voting for the SABEW Board of Governors opens Friday, April 12 and closes at 5 p.m. ET on Friday, April 19. Voting members will receive your ballot information direct from the online voting service provider Opavote.org. If you are the voting member for your newsroom and also have an individual membership, you will receive two separate emails. If your newsroom voting representation has changed, please contact Tess McLaughlin.
Ballots will be cast for seven open seats with three-year terms ending in ending in 2027.
*Incumbents running for reelection.
Mark DeCambre
Editor-in-Chief, MarketWatch
With more than 20 years of experience in business journalism, as well as two years of leading MarketWatch as its Editor-in-Chief, I’m excited by the prospect of joining SABEW’s board and adding a new perspective to a crucial journalistic institution.
I joined the profession out of a desire to tell people’s stories and suss out truth when it can seem hardest to uncover it. In an age of AI and social-media platforms such as TikTok and Meta, journalists are in a unique position to provide clarity and trusted guidance to the average person. As a business reporter for publications like The Street, the New York Post, Quartz, Institutional Investor, and Dow Jones, what has most invigorated me is the potency and impact that our work can have on people and society at large.
Presently, journalism may feel as if it is being buffeted by shifting trends in advertising, the whims of internet search engines and uncertainty fostered by newfangled technologies and geopolitics.
Still, our work is arguably more important now than ever and I believe that being a SABEW member offers a powerful way to champion this important profession, at a time where other vocations might appear buzzier, and more alluring.
As a Black journalist, and one of the few Black editors-in-chief of a major publication, I understand the need to further expand SABEW’s reach. I want to serve as a touchpoint, resource and role model to underrepresented reporters – a mission that is essential to my everyday work at MarketWatch – as it would be on the Board of Governors.
By leveraging my experiences in reporting, editing, newsroom leadership and mentorship, I would reinforce the core mission of SABEW – encourage comprehensive reporting of economic events without fear or favor and to increase members’ knowledge and skills.
I am passionate about SABEW’s purpose and believe the organization is vital to keeping the fourth estate, not just alive and kicking, but thriving and adapting.
I appreciate your consideration to join SABEW’s Board of Governors.
Stuart Elliott
Editor-in-Chief and CEO, The Real Deal
As the editor-in-chief of The Real Deal over the past two decades, I’ve built from the ground up the biggest and most authoritative real estate focused publication in the U.S. By many accounts, real estate is the biggest asset class in the world, larger even than the stock and the bond markets. It’s a huge industry, and housing is the biggest investment most people make in their lifetime. But it’s also an opaque industry, with much hidden ownership (sometimes behind shady LLCs) and little regulation compared to the securities industry.
At The Real Deal, we are laser focused on providing transparency to the market, and creating a
level playing field for industry professionals. SABEW’s mission to support comprehensive reporting of economic events without fear or favoritism – and how important that is to a functioning democracy – jibes with how I’ve spent most of my days guiding coverage over 20 years. I’m versed in developing talent with a follow-the-money reporting ethos. I’ve trained dozens of reporters who have gone on to careers at companies including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, The Information, Forbes, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, ProPublica, Hearst and many more.
In running for the SABEW Board of Governors, I’m looking to branch out beyond my newsroom to help lend a hand to building a stronger business journalism community. The training opportunities, events and competitions at the core of SABEW’s efforts are a sound way to create that cohesion. Despite having won several SABEW awards over the years, I must confess that I didn’t know the particulars of the founding of the organization until preparing to submit this application.
The fact that business reporting suffered in obscurity until as recently as the late 1950s surprised me. As did the fact that it wasn’t until Kit Larson and Charles C. Abbott’s discussion about “the generally poor reporting of business news in the country’s press,” and resulting seminars in the 1960s, that SABEW took shape. But it makes sense. I’ve always felt there is so much room for business journalism to run, and believe I am doing my part to help move it forward.
At The Real Deal, we view the real estate beat with very wide horizons. We see real estate as a lens to view how money and power work in big cities. Almost everything is a real estate story. In addition to investigative pieces, the pinnacle of our reporting efforts are the nuanced profiles we write about those figures shaping the skyline, be they developers, investors, brokers, lawyers or any other real estate players. (Buildings are inert objects; it is people that are interesting.) We write about fortunes won and lost, who’s up and who’s down. This extends to the books we’ve written over the years (two and counting). I’ve always felt there is something uniquely American about business stories.
Horatio Alger’s ubiquitous “rags to riches” legend has become one of the foundations of American society — anyone can succeed and achieve material prosperity through hard work. Once you add in the battles at the top of the food chain (sometimes its “rags to riches back to rags”), there is a straight line from that Alger tradition to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (or Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt” or Theodore Dreiser’s “The Financier”), down to more recent tales such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Succession.”
As I’ve noted in our pages, the best profiles we’ve done at The Real Deal – and in our most recent book, “The New Kings of New York” – mine this rich storytelling vein through journalism. Maybe I’ve gone on too long with this discussion about what I see about the roots of business reporting. But it speaks to the ambitions we should have as business journalists, and a path forward.
In joining the SABEW Board of Governors, I want to help support business journalism. I believe very much in its mission.
*Matthew Goldberg
Senior Consumer Banking Reporter, Bankrate
I would be grateful to continue to serve on the SABEW Board of Governors for another term. Growing SABEW’s membership and the organization are my top goals that need to be achieved this year and in the future.
I have either been a reporter or in financial services for nearly all of the past 25 years. This allows me to bring a unique perspective to SABEW’s board. I have used this experience and knowledge to make an impact on every committee that I’ve served on.
I have had the pleasure of leading the training committee since around July 2021 and the Investment Task Force since around September 2022. The training committee continues to have successful webinars that help journalists.
The Investment Task Force helped SABEW earn an estimated yield of more than 13 times what it was earning on some of its uninvested cash – an important accomplishment since every penny is important at SABEW. I’ve also been a member of the finance committee since 2019, a committee that helped SABEW navigate unprecedented times during the past few years.
It has been my pleasure serving on the conference planning committee this past spring and for most conferences since 2019. A great conference is vital for SABEW and its members.
Thank you for considering me for re-election.
Chuck Jaffe
Host of “Money Life with Chuck Jaffe;” Freelance Columnist, MarketWatch
Work in business journalism long enough, and you go through a lot of unexpected twists and turns. My decision to run for SABEW’s Board of Governors in 2024 is just the latest. That’s because I have been on SABEW’s board in some capacity for roughly one quarter of my life, and I’m now in my early 60s.
Frankly, I thought I had done it all at SABEW. I joined the board in 1991, when I was business editor at The Morning Call in Allentown, Pa. At the time, SABEW’s board had almost no representation from small/mid-sized newspapers and didn’t do much for journalists at that level. I worked to change that, running the committees that started SABEW’s first special interest conferences, that created and presented the first Best in Business Awards (over some strenuous objections from some long-time members) and the Distinguished Achievement Award. I was president of SABEW in 2002; by the time I finished my ex-officio years, I told my children it would take something major for me to ever consider returning to the Board. And yet here I am.
The major change is one that has me looking at current SABEW leadership and programs the way I did when I first joined in the late 1980s, namely that it’s missing a key element that must be served to improve the future of business journalism. Today, SABEW must find ways to serve content creators. The change from the Society of American Business Editors & Writers to the Society for the Advancement of Business Editing and Writing needs to be about more than the name. SABEW needs to find a place for content creators and to shape and tame that wild west.
SABEW has zero representation at FinCon – the gathering of bloggers, podcasters, freelancers and content creators – and is missing that grass-roots level where a journalistic ethic is sorely needed and often missing. SABEW’s board is distinguished and accomplished, but it is more removed from the young writers figuring out their way serving money nerds as The Morning Call was from the Washington Post.
My hope is to help bridge that gap, to connect SABEW with FinCon and visa versa. I am, of course, happy to serve whatever other roles I am needed for on the board, but I’m now at the part of my career where I am looking toward the future of the business I have worked in for 40 years, and I worry that if we don’t make SABEW’s mission one that is accepted and respected by content creators, we won’t like what people are reading and doing when the creators complete their takeover of the media world.
Talk to me about these issues. Let me introduce you to FinCon and its money nerds (they could be your next staffers and freelancers) and let me go chase after this mission the way the board sent me out to create the contest and more all those years ago. I’d appreciate your support.
*Janelle Nanos
Business Enterprise Reporter, The Boston Globe
I never intended to become a business journalist. I spent the first half of my career in magazines, and so the fact that I ended up in newspapers, and on the business desk, no less, still seems remarkable. But after nearly ten years working with The Boston Globe’s business team, I have been grateful to work alongside some of the smartest, most talented people in the room, and to witness the impressive scope of business reporting across the industry.
That’s why I was honored to be asked to join SABEW’s board as an interim member last year, and why I’m hoping to continue as a board member in 2024. I’ve been an informal mentor to young employees at The Globe for a while now, and so I really enjoyed working with the SABEW training committee to help create opportunities to sharpen our reporting skills by learning from each other.
I’d love to continue that work, and the work of encouraging a group of diverse young journalists to pursue a path into business reporting. As an enterprise business reporter, I’ve watched as my younger colleagues have developed story ideas that reflect the economic uncertainty they face. These stories are now SABEW winning-examples of how business desks can connect with younger audiences and drive subscriber engagement. It’s something I’d love to happen more widely with SABEW.
A bit more about me: I joined the Globe as the editor of its BetaBoston startup blog in 2014 and joined the business desk as a GA the following year. I started the “Golden Age of Consumerism” beat in 2017, just two days before Amazon bought Whole Foods, and spent six years covering retail, restaurants, and consumer culture. I’m now a business enterprise reporter writing features, investigations, and projects that dive deep into the trends that drive Boston’s economy and I serve as the assistant business editor for news innovation, where I work to expand the Globe’s business coverage across platforms. I am now working on a forthcoming book that expands on my decade-long investigation into one woman’s history of child exploitation; that Boston Globe Magazine piece was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in feature reporting and the recipient of the Dart Award for Excellence in the Coverage of Trauma.
*Brian Sozzi
Executive Editor, Yahoo Finance
I would like to state my intent to run for the 2024 SABEW Board of Governors. It has been an honor to be a member of the team for the past year, working alongside various groups to move forward SABEW’s mission. Being on the board has also allowed me to get the word out externally on SABEW’s work to drive visibility to the organization.
I believe my journalism experience and leadership position as Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor will continue to serve the board very well in the months ahead. Key areas of focus in the year ahead include membership recruitment and working on new ways to bolster visibility of SABEW.
*Oliver Staley
Freelance Editor and Reporter
I’m honored to be running for my second full term as a SABEW governor.
I was first encouraged to run for the board by the late Xana Antunes, a Quartz colleague and mentor. Xana was a long time SABEW member who understood the value the organization provides to our community of business journalists, and how important it is that SABEW remain healthy and vital.
I’ve been privileged to follow her on the board and during my tenure I’ve helped organize our conferences, served on the finance committee, and been a member of the executive committee for the past two years. I’ve also judged our annual Best in Business journalism and book contests (as well as BIB Canada!) and participated in the two Skill-Up events hosted by the Wall Street Journal.
Our organization has made a lot of progress in the last four years. We weathered Covid, successfully switched to online conferences and back again, made significant progress in shoring up our finances, and smoothly managed the transition to a new, terrific executive director. But we all know there is important work still to do: We need to increase our revenue, ideally by finding new and recurring funding streams. We need to expand our training initiatives and reach out to more college and universities. And we need to continue exploring new ways to provide value for our members in a rapidly transforming environment for business journalism. I look forward to being part of those important efforts and I hope you give me the chance to do it.
Rita Trichur
Senior Business Writer and Columnist, The Globe and Mail
I determined early on in my journalism career that a country’s real power brokers are in the business community and that an independent financial press underpins the proper functioning of markets. As a proponent of accountability journalism, I write investigative pieces and reported columns on issues such as financial crime, corruption and other failings of corporate governance. My employer, The Globe and Mail, is currently one of the largest institutional members of SABEW. Having worked for both Canada and U.S.-based news organizations, I have a global perspective.
I’m interested in running for a seat on the SABEW Board of Governors because I am passionate about our craft and enthusiastic about expanding the organization’s reach. I actively mentor younger journalists, including students, women and new immigrants, and a board seat would be another opportunity for me to give back. I have my finger on the pulse of the issues and trends that would attract and retain new members. I also understand the challenges that women and diverse journalists face in our profession.
