June 1, 2011

Business Insider
Andrew Ross Sorkin, who now runs the Dealbook financial news service for The New York Times, tells Henry Blodget that he got his start at the Times in high school by working for a few weeks as an unpaid assistant to an advertising columnist. Sorkin describes reading Stuart Elliot “so religiously that I wanted to work for him before I died.” Sorkin finally had lunch with Elliot, and “he agreed to have me come work for free for five weeks. It was so unofficial, I would literally come in the morning and wait for him so that I could get a visitor pass to walk into the building. I didn’t have a desk; I used to stand most of the day. But it was — it was nirvana. I was in the building.” Sorkin mostly made copies, stapled documents and cut out Elliot’s columns, but his “break” came when an editor heard him talking about the Internet and, not knowing how old he was, assigned him a story.

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Steve Myers was the managing editor of Poynter.org until August 2012, when he became the deputy managing editor and senior staff writer for The Lens,…
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