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Gretchen Morgenson: A Journalism Watchdog of Wall Street

Gretchen Morgenson
The New York Times

Gretchen Morgenson, an assistant business and financial editor of The New York Times, doesn’t party with the people in the financial world she writes about.

“I don’t expect them to like what I do,” says Morgenson, who writes a weekly column, entitled Fair Game, which probably makes some brokers feel like prey. I am not part of their PR machine and a lot of people in journalism don’t understand that’s okay. I don’t want to be at their party. If I am one of the journalists who is in the room at the party, then I am not going to report on these people in an unjaundiced way. “ She explains why.  “I don’t want to go to their parties, “ she once said in an interview. “I don’t want to be invited. I don’t want to be inside the tent. I want my nose pressed up against the glass doing my job.”

Morgenson does her job very well. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002 for her Wall Street coverage. She said that spending three years as a stock broker in the 1980’s with Dean Witter prepared her to watchdog the financial industry. She has covered the stock market for The New York Times since 1998.