Markets: News  

David Callaway

A final salute from MarketWatch's editor

7/19/12 12:01 AM ET (MarketWatch)Print

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch)--I'm leaving MarketWatch after the markets close tomorrow, ending 13 years of round-the-clock news excitement, Internet mania, 4:45 a.m. wake-up calls, and constantly impending financial disaster.

Starting next week, I'll be working from the East Coast, as Editor-in-Chief of USA Today, one of the leaders of modern journalism in both print and Internet. I couldn't be more excited. After meeting the talented and passionate staff at the paper and online last week in McLean, Va., I know it will be a thrilling ride. That Larry Kramer, founder of MarketWatch and now publisher of USA Today, is leading the way, makes it all the better.

But this column is about MarketWatch. Not the website, the business, or the legacy it's built as one of the original "new media" operations. About the people. The men and women who've worked for MarketWatch, and its predecessor, CBS MarketWatch, over the past 15 years. The journalists who worked the magic each day--each hour--to bring more than 1 million daily readers in 70 countries, and the Vatican, a new form of news and entertainment. A journalism steeped in wonderful, creative writing; instant analysis, colorful commentary and breaking news wherever it happens.

It's easy to look at any news website today and think it's simply a bunch of bots and servers, manned by a handful of engineers pulling stories from Google and other news organizations around the web. But MarketWatch was never that. From the very beginning, we aimed to have our own unique news staff, with our own news judgment, our own pace, our own brand of display. As the tech bubble popped at the beginning of the past decade, that unique take on how to cover news and deliver it in web, video, audio, even print form, set us apart and helped save us from extinction near birth.

Our life inside Dow Jones, which bought MarketWatch seven years ago, has only helped us grow. We've expanded to places like Germany, Spain, and Australia, in addition to Israel, Japan, Hong Kong and London. None of that would have been possible without the dedication and loyalty of the MarketWatch staff--people who worked together and lived their lives through some of the most momentous news events of the past decade and a half. We won awards together and celebrated in places ranging from the Foreign Correspondent's Club in Hong Kong to The Old Bell pub on Fleet Street in London to Schroeder's, the German beer hall in San Francisco. And no one who was there will ever forget the staff retreats to Vegas.

There were scary times as well. I remember the real fear of imminent danger in the San Francisco newsroom after the 9/11 attack, when initial reports said there were still planes headed to the West Coast. I remember standing on a desk in the middle of the newsroom, and telling the staff of about 50 people in San Francisco that anybody who felt they needed to leave to get home to their families could. Only one person did.

I remember working all night during the controversial 2000 presidential election, going back and forth between the MarketWatch newsroom and appearances on the local CBS affiliate, which interrupted programming to broadcast until morning. I remember our team breaking stories on the collapse of Enron and WorldCom. Our coverage of the global markets as the Iraq war began, as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami hit, as the Dubai debt crisis started the global financial chaos of the past few years. And as Lehman Brothers buckled and the world teetered on financial collapse for 72 hours in September, 2008.

Through it all, the MarketWatch team around the world worked urgently to file headlines, break news, supply data and charts, provide instant and long-form analysis, and generate some of the best commentary out there from our stable of columnists. At the same time the very real men and women behind the coverage for all our readers lived their daily lives together. They helped each other through sicknesses and deaths of fathers and mothers, siblings and friends. They lived the excitement of news assignments around the world and built their careers. They found love, and married--sometimes to each other--and had beautiful children who transformed their lives.

There was Julie Rannazzisi, our original bond reporter and later New York bureau chief, who tragically passed away in 2004 from cancer at the age of 35. There was Marshall Loeb, the father of modern business journalism and a MarketWatch columnist, who still writes for us at age 83, and who until just a few years ago appeared in print on the web, on TV and on radio every single day. And there is everybody in between who has dedicated their time, their effort and their careers to making MarketWatch the greatest financial news organization the Internet age has ever known.

Those are the things I'm most proud of. That I've been able to make MarketWatch a secure, challenging and exciting part of their careers and lives. And at the same time, been able to share their hopes and dreams, and successes and hardships.

This is just the beginning, of course. The next decade and a half will yield even more changes to how news is collected and delivered. Even more momentous news events. Even more excitement, drama, fear and adrenaline in newsrooms across the globe. And the men and women of MarketWatch will be there for you.

So let others fret about the future of journalism. The world now demands more news than ever. The opportunities are enormous. I've no doubt that the creative, colorful and exquisitely outrageous characters who make the magic at MarketWatch will be there to inform, entertain, delight, and enrage millions and millions of readers for years to come, every hour of every day.

It's been the joy of my career to have worked among them for so long, and to have contributed what I could to this amazing, pioneering, history-making story.

For as the late Hunter Thompson once told Hugh Hefner about their own unique media legacies:

"We are champions, and we can prove it!"