Allan Sloan

Allan Sloan is the Senior Editor-At-Large for Fortune magazine. Before that he was the Wall Street Editor at Newsweek magazine. He is a weekly contributor to Public Radio International’s Marketplace. Earlier in his career he was a senior editor for Forbes magazine. He has been writing Business Journalism for 38 years. He is a six-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award. He also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers in 2001, and he has won the John Hancock Award for excellence in business and financial journalism. He is from Brooklyn. He received his master’s degree from the Columbia Journalism School in 1967, and he received his bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College in 1966.

Sloan delivered the third William O’Neil Lecture in Business Journalism on February 26 at Southern Methodist University. Sloan talked about how he does not think journalism is dead. He thinks that journalism has a business problem instead. He talked about how people need to invest in journalism so reporters can keep on informing the public of what is going on in the world. He believes it is important to keep people informed of what they do not know. He thinks if more people start to think of journalism as a business then journalism can survive.

Sloan talked about how he believes physical newspapers are gradually going to fade away. I definitely agree with him. As Sloan said it will take a while before they do but it is going to happen. Most people my age do not read physical newspapers but instead read the news online. I myself prefer to get my news online. It is more convenient and it is free. I agree with Sloan when he says it is a money issue and not a journalism problem. Physical newspapers need for people to actually buy them so the business can keep running. Right now physical newspapers are surviving because they also have an online version. Plus there is still an older generation of people who enjoy reading physical newspapers or do not know their way around technology. However, as technology keeps advancing and as people keep learning I think more and more people will turn to the Internet for news. As we discussed in my Digital Journalism class there are advantages of online journalism. Those advantages include audience control, nonlinearity, storage and retrieval, unlimited space, immediacy, multimedia capability, and interactivity. As Sloan said journalism will be around but we do not know in what form. We will only know until we get there. I agree with him that no matter what happens the skills that journalists have of understanding and synthesizing information will be useful no matter what.