Karen w arenson biography

He became a good source of mine. But again, the light went off in my head and I said, I think there's a lot more to learn. I could learn it on the job, but maybe I should learn it faster. I looked at MBA programs. Actually, I looked around for a couple of courses to take in finance and accounting and discovered that I couldn't find any you could just take a little bit.

The Internet didn't exist at that point. I got through finance and accounting. I loved them actually. I took Financial Institutions. I thought, maybe I'll keep going. I got into marketing. And I was sitting there one Saturday writing about plastic braided dog leashes and I thought, I don't care about this and that was the end of my MBA. I already had one Master's.

But it gave me another set of tools that were really helpful. I discovered over the years as I went into financial journalism, particularly at The Times, that there were lots of people who came in like I did without much background and I would give them quick tutorials. And I'd found some short booklets by then and said, here, this might help.

Back to the numbers, analytical. I specialized a lot in finance.

Karen w arenson biography: Karen W. Arenson is

I covered options and commodities because no one else wanted to touch them and I was game. They had to do with numbers. Trading, packaging mortgages, that was right up my alley. So when packaging mortgages began in the 70s I was there writing about it for the first time. I think I've wandered a bit, but that's how I got into it. I worked in the Chicago bureau of Business Week for roughly four years and found I did dive into some of the new areas that were developing; the first trading of financial futures on the Chicago Board of Trade, the development of options, all these new topics that no one else knew anything about either.

And even though we didn't have bylines in Business Week, I guess I began to develop a bit of a reputation for knowing about these things, and I began to get approached by other media. At some point, I talked to my Business Week editors about what my future looked like as I began to get offers. I picked up my husband, who had begun to practice law in Chicago.

His senior partner took me out to lunch and said, you're ruining his career. His grandmother took me out to lunch and said, you're taking my oldest grandson away from me. We moved to New York. At that point, it's the problem of dual career households. How do you manage them both? How do you optimize them? We were taking turns at that point.

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So we moved to New York and he said, jumping around isn't going to be really easy. Why don't we just settle? New York wasn't his idea of paradise. The economics editor said, you don't have a PhD you can't cover economics. Very nice. I really think I should stay a little longer with Business Week; come back to me at some karen w arenson biography, maybe.

They said, okay. And then a couple weeks later The Times came and I said the same thing. I said that and they said, but we're about to start our new business section and we have two slots, and now or never, lady. I said, okay. I can't resist. I moved to The Times in '78 and started covering Wall Street and economics topics. I just sort of drifted into that.

They didn't say you don't have a PhD you can't do that, although, their main economics writer, Leonard Silk did have a PhD. I covered a lot of different topics. I loved working under the financial editor, John Lee. Anything I was interested in he seemed to be interested in, including the changing mortgage markets, which we're seeing burst open now.

But it all goes back to what was happening in the 70s when they begin to package them as securities and trade them. We wrote about it first. One Friday afternoon during the summer or late spring, my editor came to me and said, I'd like you to go to Washington on Monday and start covering the tax bill. We had a tax writer in Washington and he was going on vacation for the month of August and Congress hadn't wrapped up their tax bill.

It was important enough so they needed somebody and he thought I could just pick up. So I spent the weekend reading about taxes. I think my husband had picked up our tax returns. I didn't know a debit from-- I knew a debit from an asset, but I didn't know anything about tax forms or taxes, or Washington for that matter other than having worked at Brookings one summer, which was wonderful while I was in college.

I covered the big Reagan transformation of tax policy in August and came back to New York and my editor said, now let's do a series on all the changes that have been wrought. We did a 10, 12 part series, I did. It was a real race because so much had changed, so drastically. Reagan really had a different view of taxes and economics as most people would remember.

To begin to sort out on deadline twice a week what the different pieces of the tax law karen w arenson biography all about was really a challenge. I'd be talking to people up on the hill and tax lawyers who followed it closely, and we'd all be scratching our heads, but I had a deadline: five o'clock twice a week. So we put together a series.

At the time, The Times public relations office said they'd never gotten so many requests for reprints as they had for that, which was just amazing to me-- tax policy. And then I started to get calls from agents and editors saying, can you make a book out of this? I had to double the size of the series; a lot of it was what had gone into the paper put between book covers.

It got picked up by the Book of the Month Club, which sent it out as a premium in paperback topeople. Citibank boughtcopies or something like that, as a premium again. I think I got two or three cents a copy. Then people said, all right, now you're out there, do a book on investing. I said, that's not where my heart is. That's how that book got put together.

It sold some copies too, but it wasn't a bestseller. But there were a lot of copies because it was useful to people at the time. Well, even if they just sat somewhere. I don't have a framed bestseller list unfortunately. How did that transition into higher education happen? I was reporting on economics, finance, Wall Street until I got pregnant and had a daughter in The Times had a six-month maternity leave, which I took.

When I was ready to come back, I assumed I would segue right back into my old life, only my editor had different ideas. He had gotten a temporary person to fill in for me during the six months and wanted to keep that person on staff and he needed more editing. He said, I'd like you to move into editing. I said, no thanks; I really like reporting.

And he said, not an option. He said, you can go back if you really don't like it. I said, ehh. Anyway, it wasn't an option. So he said, you can still go out and meet people and that's good because you'll be a better editor. So suddenly I found myself editing feature stories, what we call display pieces for the business section of The Times.

It was a very draining job. It took a lot of effort. It took a lot of hours. There were a lot a battles surprisingly, but it was interesting too. I was learning things that I didn't know. It was broadening me out. It was showing me how the paper was put together. After I'd done that for a year or two I suddenly was told that my next assignment was to edit the Sunday business section.

And so suddenly I was running my own small section once a week. I had about a dozen people under me. I had no idea what the budget was at that time. I got plucked up and dumped down and there's no real training. Newsrooms weren't very good about saying, Let us teach you how to be a manager or a leader. Let us teach you how to do a budget. None of that.

I'd get a note saying, your budget's due next week. I'd say, budget? I have never seen the numbers. Here they are. But it began to give me access to the rest of the paper. About the same time I was approached to be deputy Week in Review editor and opted actually to stay in business. I liked what I was doing and thought that I could add more value, plus it was my section instead of being somebody else's deputy.

I was Sunday business editor for a couple of years and then moved back into the daily as the news editor. Again, I wasn't sure I really wanted this job. I liked what I was doing at that point. I had my own section, why did I want to go back into being number three or four? But again, I was told this was what I was going to do next. That actually was one of my favorite jobs ever-- to my surprise.

This was the mid 80s, so there still wasn't Internet really, or it would have been even more overwhelming. I had to get in by about 8 am and start pulling together the day's business section for The Times. My editor was pretty laid back and so I had a very strong hand in shaping the section on a day-to-day basis. In the end, the editor made the final decisions and arranged the front business page, but it really was a wide open job.

As I said, I loved figuring out what was going on and what we needed to do. It fit me. From there I got promoted to deputy editor. Then my editor had a battle with The Times and left, and The Times had gone through a couple of business editors and decided to go outside. At that point I decided to go back into writing. I said, I've done this for 10 years-- editing, something I never intended to.

It's been really interesting; I can now go back to doing what I loved most, which was writing and reporting. I'd been running the section; I was actually acting business editor for about half a year. Instead of going back into writing economics and business under the people I'd been supervising, I felt like I should go out and work for people I hadn't been on top of, I briefly did not-for-profits, which interested me, but didn't interest the editors at the top so much.

They let me do it briefly. But at some point, the executive editor had dinner with a university president and came away feeling like they should beef up their higher ed coverage. The next morning I got called into his office to say: you know higher ed. You've done all this MIT stuff. Why don't you start covering it? I'd been on the Corporation as a trustee.

I'd been on the Executive Committee and had just gotten an invitation to go back on. Those were all things I had to walk away from. I did finish out my year as Alumni Association president. I said, all this was approved in advance. I didn't say yes to anything before accepting. For that period of writing about higher ed, I had to basically cut my activities with MIT so there was no conflict or apparent conflict.

The slot that was open at that point was Metro Higher Ed, to focus mainly on New York, Connecticut, New Jersey higher ed, which was interesting in and of itself. But the editor said that you should do some national stuff too, because we really want some of that. So I did a mix of metro and national. I focused on New York and the three states, and some national trend things.

Metro was interesting. So there were a lot of selective colleges. And the City University of New York, which was our big backyard institution-- one of the biggest public universities in America-- was in the midst of a huge controversy with Mayor Guiliani, who said it should be bombed out of existence. There were all sorts of really fascinating issues and I loved the beat and never was sorry, except for walking away from my life at MIT for those years.

But as a reporter and writer I never got bored and I learned a lot. My favorites list probably includes both some of what I liked best and some of what other people liked best. Other stories I loved that took a lot of quantitative digging included things like the fact that there were a whole set of students who were not graduating from high school, not earning a high school equivalency diploma and still going to college at a time when everybody's so upset over students not being well prepared for college, and even high school graduates get to college and have to take a lot of remedial work.

Here was a subset that people really didn't know about it. I don't remember how I stumbled on it. It was hard to get figures because no one counted them. I spent months and months looking for a way to get my arms around it, looking for a researcher who had maybe dug into it. In the end, the American Council on Education had some researchers who knew about some data tapes and we ultimately did find some numbers and found that something like three or four percent of entering college students didn't have a high school diploma, which to me was a significant number.

In fact, I got two calls the day the story ran. I had referred to the data, but without getting specific because it was a data tape. I'm sorry I didn't characterize it more. But one nice thing was they had to call me to ask. I could then karen w arenson biography them, but the fact that the Department of Education in Washington wasn't on top of this, even though it was their data set in the end, was a lot of fun.

A different kind of story that I loved was a feature piece on the first woman ever to be among the winners of the Putnam Prize, which is the big math contest in college. There had, until-- I don't remember whether it was the late 90s or early s-- never been a woman who was in the top five. It's an all-day test that the best math students in colleges around the country take, and they don't even tell you the top score.

They tell you the top five. All these years there had never been one woman. It turned out there was a woman at NYU who won, although there was no announcement. I stumbled across it. The Putnam contest people, if they had put out anything didn't make a big deal of it. It hadn't entered the media. But because I'd been at MIT and knew what the Putnam Contest was and knew how few women there were who made it to the top of math, it grabbed me.

So I went and found out about her. She was an Eastern European, who, oddly enough, had come to New York because her boyfriend had come to New York and he was a graduate student. He had actually, I think, also helped coach her in studying math and for math contests when she was a high school student. It ended up being a fun story about women in math and about this love story between this immigrant student who had followed a boyfriend and what it was like to be a kid who spent six or eight hours a day, or 10 or 12 learning math problems, playing with math problems, just so she could be a contestant while she was in high school.

It was just fun. I mean, not all of them were math related. One morning, checking them out, I noticed that there was a story about a kid at NYU who was sleeping in the library and who didn't have a room or a dorm room because it was too expensive. He had literally lived in the library all semester. So I went and did a piece about this slightly unusual student and where he kept his clothes in his locker and how much money he had and what it was like to duck the night watchman and so on and so forth.

It got good attention. It's funny sometimes what does draw editors' attention and readers' attention. Sometimes it is little feature stories that aren't significant in a big way, but tell you about a corner of the world you never thought about and are fun to read, and they make a mix. I loved doing all sorts of pieces on the City University of New York and trying to explain a public university that most of our readers never thought about.

A lot of them, many of them probably, had gone there as students when City College was a big deal and kids didn't go away to college. But times had changed and City University had become a very different institution, and got a lot of the kids who needed remedial work from inner city schools. Watching the whole set of political issues play out, and watching the university and its faculty over some period of years was a wonderful assignment.

So those are among my It would be nice to think so, but in a funny way, I doubt it. Journalism itself is changing so much right now. It's imploding. The whole economic model doesn't work, so that's in play. And journalism's very much a function of who's doing the editing and who's doing the reporting. Each person has his or her own way of going about it.

To jump back to your last question, on favorite stories, another piece-- a lot of it we did we did just as a single reporter. I didn't have a secretary. I didn't have an assistant. But more and more, there's beginning to be teamwork and double bylines and triple bylines and quadruple bylines. One of my colleagues at the time, Sara Rimer was a wonderful narrative writer.

She did a lot of work out of Boston. The two of us were at a lunch where we heard somebody talking about who were the black students at Harvard, and how they weren't really American blacks. A lot of them turned out to be from Africa or from the Carribean. They were immigrants. They were either foreign students or immigrants, first or second generation.

Sara and I teamed up, and I started looking for the data and she did the narrative. I bring it up because it's an illustration of how personal things are. If she had done the story alone it would have been very different. If I had done it alone, it would have been very different. I left The Times last year. I took a buy-out. Each of the journalists there does things their way.

Karen w arenson biography: Karen W. Arenson is

While I like to hope that the stories I did along the way had impact at the time, it's hard for me to think that I changed the way things were done. At one point I was having lunch at the Russell Sage Foundation with a source there and ran into the president who said, isn't there some way to make other journalists more numeric? Can we come in and give classes in statistics?

I said, well I'm willing to help try to introduce you, but I don't know whether there's a way to do that. The New York Times does have a much bigger graphics desks than it did when I first joined The Times, and so there are people who focus on gathering data and presenting it, and some of their graphics are really wonderful. At one point, when I was looking into how high schools taught math as an outgrowth of a story I did about math in college, I began talking to college math professors around the country and to people at the National Science Foundation who were trying to shift the way math was taught in college because they thought that math was one of the classes where kids flunked out.

They flunk their math class and then they just leave college. It was the highest failure rate of anything, and they were trying to see if there were other kinds of math you could give that would be useful to students that was quote unquote college level math. Maybe it didn't have to be calculus, or even pre-calculus. Maybe it could be probability and statistics.

Several of them said they tore the graphics out of the New York Times-- this comes full circle-- to use in their classes, because they wanted their students to be able to read and decipher numeric data as it was presented in a daily newspaper, a high level daily newspaper, but a daily newspaper. Then there were those who said, not only did they collect the graphics as good examples, they also collected the ones that were mistakes.

One of them said, I have this fat folder of graphics with mistakes in them. I think that teaching probability and statistics is a really interesting karen w arenson biography and a good one, but I never got to do that story because it was about the point I left The Times, but I thought it was a really neat movement and one that made a lot of sense and I hope it works.

About the future of journalism? About the changes that are happening? Hard to know where to begin. I always felt as a journalist that I was doing something that was a public service for society even though it was within the structure of a profit-making company. Society needs journalists who stand outside and report, hopefully objectively, who try to piece things together and help people make sense of the world around them.

It has become a very different world with the Internet. There's a lot more information out there that's accessible. But I do believe that a sorting, filtering mechanism, or many sorting, filtering mechanisms are really important because there's a lot of bad information as well as good information. The Times is still one of the best journalistic operations.

I believe that if you took it by itself it may still be in the black marginally, but the rest of the company, which not only includes the Boston Globe but a handful of regional papers and other operations, have pulled it into the red. Hopefully they will find their way out of their financial mess. It is a mess. They have worked very hard and very successfully to develop the digital side of the news operation at The Times.

It's widely seen as one of the best websites and they're doing more and more. They have a whole set of experiments. The Nieman Lab has covered some of that. They're making some headway in finding out how to make it profitable, or at least something that doesn't run red ink. But whether they will find the right solution, whether there is a right solution for them or Dow Jones or any other news organization, I don't know.

People have floated-- have begun to float-- other models like an endowed newspaper, but as we've seen from universities, endowments aren't always the silver bullet either. It's certainly helpful to have a bunch of money in the bank, but they raise their own questions about how best to manage them and use them. There are other new models: the Paul Steiger operation, which again, is a nonprofit for investigative reporters that has funding and where they hope they can discover things and send out the stories of what they discover, and get them run somewhere.

So we're in a time of ferment. Young people, some of them are karen w arenson biography trying to come in. Some of the good ones are throwing up their hands and going elsewhere. That's a loss to society. Maybe they'll come back if there turn out to be vehicles that work. I sure don't have the answers. But the buy-out I took was because The Times needed to shrink the newsroom and I had an ill father and it was just right for me to walk out because I was juggling too much.

But it grew out of their financial problems. Why do you think that is? What is your connection to the university? I came to campus and suddenly found myself in a community, not only of very smart people, but people who talked my language, who thought analytically and quantitatively. I just felt like I could communicate, like I was a piece of them, even if a lot of them were going into science and engineering and I was going into economics, I never felt like I was outside the mainstream.

This was my community. It was also a place-- some of my best friends, many of my best friends are still classmates from MIT. Early life and education [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 15, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on Retrieved Harvard Magazine.

Archived from the original on September 10, Retrieved April 4, ISSN Village Voice. Career [ edit ]. References [ edit ]. The New York Times. Archived from the original on October 15, The Chronicle of Higher Education. Archived from the original on Retrieved Harvard Magazine. Archived from the original on September 10, Retrieved April 4, ISSN Village Voice.

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