The Best Business Writing 2012

Edited by Dean Starkman, Martha M. Hamilton, Ryan Chittum, and Felix Salmon

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June, 2012
Paper, 464 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-16073-5
$18.95 / £13.00

The Best Business Writing 2012 reflects the year’s most intriguing reporting and rigorous investigative journalism at a time of dramatic economic crisis and upheaval. Covering bad business behavior, the intersection of politics and money, and big-picture analysis, the volume fills a longstanding gap for those seeking diverse, enriching, and lively perspectives on the business world.

This year’s selections include Rolling Stone’s profile of Don Blankenship and his brutal tenure as CEO of Massey Energy; the Guardian’s groundbreaking and courageous investigation into the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and its indictment of the Rupert Murdoch media empire; and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s poignant account of the fatal consequences of federal deregulation in health and medicine. Two searing pieces on the ongoing mortgage scandal, one a hard look at the role of Merrill Lynch in inflating the housing bubble for its own gain and so bringing about its own destruction, and the other a detailed breakdown of Countrywide’s malfeasance, provide critical context for the financial crisis; while articles on recoveries in Norway, Germany, and elsewhere examine the global recession. Additional articles tackle bank fees and bailouts, the Buffett Rule, the influence of the corporate lobby, the legacy of Alan Greenspan, and the future of the American auto industry, and provide intimate looks behind the scenes of such companies as Pfizer, Google, and IKEA.

Contributors include Warren Buffett, Paul Krugman, Gretchen Morgenson, Steve Pearlstein, James B. Stewart, Matt Taibbi, and Martin Wolf.

Related Subjects

• Business
• Economics & Finance
• Journalism & Media Studies

Series

• Columbia Journalism Review Books

About the Author

Dean Starkman is editor of the Columbia Journalism Review’s business section, The Audit, which tracks financial journalism in print and on the web, and is the magazine's Kingsford Capital Fellow. A reporter for two decades, he worked eight years as a Wall Street Journal staff writer and was chief of the Providence Journal's investigative unit. He has won numerous national and regional journalism awards and helped lead the Providence Journal to the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Investigations.

Ryan Chittum is deputy editor of CJR’s The Audit. He’s a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and has written for numerous other publications, including the New York Times. He is also a contributor to Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century. His recent work can be seen at http://www.cjr.org/author/ryan-chittum-1/.

Martha M. Hamilton is a writer and deputy editor with PolitiFact.com, which, in 2009, became the first non-print winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She also investigates complaints about financial journalism for CJR’s The Audit. She was a writer, Wall Street and corporate crime editor, and personal finance columnist for The Washington Post until 2008. Hamilton is also the author, along with former Post colleague Warren Brown, of Black and White and Red All Over.

Felix Salmon is the finance blogger for Reuters. He arrived in the United States in 1997 from England, where he worked at Euromoney magazine. He also wrote daily commentary on Latin American markets for the former news service, Bridge News, and created the Economonitor blog for Roubini Global Economics.

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