NewsBios Presents: What You Won't Find in Marcus Brauchli's Official Biography

Part One:  Brauchli’s Liberal Roots

Marcus Walker Brauchli, who becomes managing editor of The Wall Street Journal on May 15, 2007, grew up in the mostly liberal college town of Boulder, Colorado, and is the son of a Boulder attorney who is known nationally as a liberal blogger and columnist.

Brauchli, who goes by Marcus (not Marc) and whose name is pronounced just like the cruciferous vegetable, assumes the helm of a paper whose editorial page is a bastion of American conservative thought – but whose newsroom is more politically heterogeneous.

The day after Brauchli was named to succeed current WSJ Managing Editor, Paul E. Steiger, Brauchli’s appointment was celebrated by the politics and current events blog, Spot-on.com, for which Marcus’ father, Christopher R. Brauchli, is a regular contributor.

“They’ve got the apple but we’ve got the tree,” beamed journalist Chris Nolan, who founded Spot-on.com (then called “Politics from Left to Right”) in 2003.

Marcus’s father, Christopher, earned his law degree at the University of Colorado after graduating from Harvard University.  The elder Brauchli is a former President of the Colorado Bar Association and founder of its Lend-a-Lawyer program, which provides legal services to what it terms the “less fortunate members of society.”

Both Christopher R. Brauchli and Marcus’s mother, Margot, are listed by the ACLU Foundation of Colorado as “Protectors of the Bill of Rights” donors -- $501 to $1,000 – in the foundation’s 2003-2004 annual report.

Margot Brauchli is also listed as a donor to various Colorado Democratic candidates as well as the Democratic National Committee by the website, newsmeat.com.

Margot has been a lifetime supporter of the arts in Boulder, and according to the Daily Camera is a co-founder of the Boulder Bach Festival and Jarrow Montesori.

Margot is the granddaughter of Col. Joseph Harvey Long, a founder of The (West Virginia) Herald-Dispatch.  She is the youngest child of Paul Walker Long, the son of Col. Long.

In April 2003, Marcus and his family visited Huntington, West Virginia, to learn more about their journalistic legacy.  “All these years, I’ve been reading all these biographies, and it occurred to me I didn’t know enough about my own family history,” Marcus told the local newspaper.

(Learn more about the Journal’s new managing editor and his family history in upcoming editions of NewsBio’s free “Spotlight.”)

-- Research by Cindy Lampner & Dean Rotbart

These WSJ Reporters Hold Claim to the Paper’s Prime Real Estate

More than 900 total bylines appeared on the front page of the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal in the six-month period ending March 31, 2007.

Page One of the Journal remains one of the most influential corners of news real estate in the business and financial journalism profession.

Of those whose bylines graced the Journal’s front page, just eight reporters can boast that they wrote or contributed to ten or more page one articles.

How did the reporter covering your company or clients stack up against his or her colleagues for number and quality of bylines?

Washington D.C.-based Jackie Calmes, a Journal veteran who writes on the intersection of politics and economics, led her colleagues not in shear number of Page One bylines but in terms of their NewsBios’ weighted value.

(Since October 1, 2006, NewsBios has tracked each and every reporter whose byline appears in The Wall Street Journal – including reporters for sibling news organizations such as MarketWatch and Dow Jones News Service.  The NewsBios databases note each reporter’s total byline count, location of bylines, and “byline points” based upon a proprietary weighting system to separate ordinary bylines from high-visibility bylines.)

Calmes posted five solo Page One stories and five additional co-written pieces. Her efforts just edged out colleague Mark Whitehouse, who had the same number of solo front page articles but fewer shared bylines.

While comparing bylines isn't the only measure of influence for reporters at a news organization, it is an important component. Editors at most major news organizations keep track of similar byline statistics, which can be used in job performance reviews and determining beat assignments.

Other Journal reporters accruing double-digit bylines or contributions between October 1 and March 31 were Yochi J. Dreazen, Greg Jaffe, Charles Forelle, Guy Chazan, Greg Ip and Dennis K. Berman.

 Rounding out the list of 25 top Page One point gathers:

Note:  NewsBios' byline databases are based on actual page-by-page counts of the Monday through Saturday print edition and may reflect regional variations. Our counts are also subject to unintentional human error.

NewsBios clients who order profiles of WSJ reporters are now able to compare each journalist’s editorial production and influence to all other reporters at the paper. 

Meet the 30 Under 30 Honorees -
Stephanie Clifford 

While big sis Lee Clifford climbs the editorial masthead at Fortune, Stephanie Clifford of Inc. has been making her own advances. Ms. Clifford, who has been at the entrepreneurial publication just two short years, was recently promoted to become Inc.’s first senior writer since the magazine changed owners and moved to New York in 2003.

She’s set herself apart, says big sis (an assistant managing editor at Fortune) through skilled storytelling and lively writing. Among her specialties ― profiles. In fact, Stephanie Clifford points to a feature chronicling the unraveling of a 25-year partnership and friendship at D'Artagnan, the foie-gras company, as among her greatest accomplishments last year. Other stories of note were profiles on Method, a hip San Francisco cleaning-products company, and one on Gert Boyle, the 82-year-old head of Columbia Sportswear. Additionally, she wrote on innovative ways small companies were coping with high gas prices. Besides penning features, Ms. Clifford also makes television and radio appearances on behalf of Inc. and has posted to the magazine's Fresh Inc. blog.

Ms. Clifford’s road to Inc. began at the tender age of five when as a youngster growing up in Seattle she began assembling newsletters about the goings-on in her house. She followed that foray up in high school, where she was the editorial-page editor of The Exonian at Phillips Exeter. Then at Harvard, where she majored in English, American Literature and Language, she was executive editor overseeing business and city coverage for The Harvard Crimson.

She says she finds journalism a “fascinating job where you spend your days talking to interesting people and diving into new subjects.”

Know the Beat

Retailing Reporters
Biographical Facts Culled From The NewsBios Files On These Reporters

Gail Appleson – St. Louis Post-Dispatch: 
Born: 11/21/1951
Longest story of the past year:  “Brown Shoe president has learned to love her shoes” – 1,596 words.  She previously served as Reuters’ New York-based law correspondent.

Cindy Atoji – The Boston Globe: 
Born:  6/28/1960
Recent stories on:  hiking boots; golf retailers; florists; personal chefs and lingerie.  Her married name is Cynthia A. Szubzda.

Elisabeth Butler – Crain’s New York Business: 
Has covered retailing since joining the weekly in late summer 2004. She previously worked for New Orleans City Business.

James Covert – Dow Jones News Service:
Originally covered power companies and utilities for the newswire.  Began retail reporting in early 2001.

Sharon Edelson – Women’s Wear Daily:
Wrote about CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo in October 1999, noting that guests at her wedding the previous June included Barbara Walters and Martha Stewart.

Pallavi Gogoi – BusinessWeek Online: 
A freelance contributor, she demonstrates a clear interest in the topic of cloning, especially as it relates to the food chain.  She has written six stories on the topic since the beginning of the year.  She previously was a Business Week correspondent in Chicago and covered finance for Dow Jones News Service.

Anne D’Innocenzio – The Associated Press:
Born 12/13/1962
For much of 2004, Ms. D’Innocenzio reported on the business impact of Martha Stewart’s legal woes on her company, Martha Stewart Living.

Karen Jacobs – Reuters:
Based in Atlanta,  companies on her beat include Home Depot, Sears, Whirlpool, Maytag, La-Z-Boy and Black & Decker. First Reuters byline was November 2000.

Steve Painter – Arkansas Democrat Gazette:
Written more than 100 stories on Wal-Mart or including Wal-Mart since joining the paper in October 2006.  He previously worked for the Wichita Eagle.

Pia Sarkar – San Francisco Chronicle: 
Born:  11/15/1972
Previously wrote for newspapers including the Buffalo News, the Providence Journal, and The Record (NJ).  Joined the Chronicle in fall of 2000.

Joan Verdon – The (Bergen) Record:
A prolific writer, on May 19, 2006 she had three bylined stories in the paper: 1394 words; 796 words and 131 words.  She often has two bylines in a day.  She joined the paper in 1982.

Elaine Walker – Miami Herald: 
Born: 1/14/1969
A 1990 graduate of Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, she married Spencer Rose on May 6, 2000. She is from Hollywood, FL.  Rose, 43, is a lawyer.

For detailed NewsBios on these journalists and dozens of other retail reporters, contact us.

For more information, contact the NewsBios Customer Service center at 1-866-NEWS-070, ext. 2.   

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