Outside Cable News

Via MarketWatch
TV biz journalists owe Mike Kandel a big debt
Commentary: Plus, the appropriate blame in the NYT-Emily Gould affair
By Jon Friedman

NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — Myron Kandel vividly remembers when he was about to begin a career in television nearly three decades ago.
At a meeting of the Society of Business Writers and Editors, Kandel, a lifelong print journalist, told some friends about his plans to join something called the Cable News Network.
Elizabeth Yamashita, a rather blunt professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, looked at the unprepossessing Kandel and shot back, “YOU are going to be on television?”

Chagrined, Kandel replied, “Yes, Elizabeth, I’M going to be on television.”

Kandel, who started at CNN in 1980, didn’t bother to mention what he told me a few weeks ago: that his entire body of TV work until that point had consisted of three appearances on panel shows.

A big debt

Television business journalists — as well as investors and news junkies — owe Kandel an enormous debt.

Kandel retired in 2005, although his fans can still catch him when he appears on PBS’s “Nightly Business Report.” He worked at CNN for 25 years, serving as the network’s financial editor and a very popular commentator. He shrugs off the notion that he was a trailblazer, but I’m happy to call him one.

More than anyone else, Kandel and the late, great Louis Rukeyser popularized financial news on TV. Today’s broadcast journalists could learn a great deal from understanding what distinguished Kandel and Rukeyser from their peers. They knew their stuff, of course — and they offered viewers much more than many of today’s shouters, who seem to aim as much for entertainment as for analysis.

>Read the rest at MarketWatch.