Riva Atlas: I’m  a Senior Researcher at Blue Heron Research Partners. It’s an independent research firm that uses a lot of the basics of investigative journalism, like detailed interviews with former executives as well as deep dives into records to assess management teams at different companies. I’ve been there for a dozen years, and these days I head up the company’s financial sector. I’m drawing on the expertise I built up covering finance at various publications, as well as things I’ve done since I left journalism. I also have an education role at Blue Heron, helping our team improve their skills. 

Quentin Hardy: Let’s get into that in a bit. First, talk a bit about how you got into journalism.

RA: It’s not exactly a straight line. I saw “All the President’s Men” when I was little, and that idea of pursuing the truth, digging in until you found it, really stayed with me. There was a romance to it. 

I really wanted to do political journalism, but the circumstances didn’t go that way. Both of my parents were from Europe, and came to the U.S. to escape the Holocaust. As it happened, my father sold his business and my parents retired to Israel in their late 50s, so just out of college I was on my own in New York. My plan had been to move to DC and work for the Washington Monthly. Instead, I immediately looked in the Help Wanted section for jobs, and – this was the 80s go-go years of the stock market – there were a lot of financial publications looking for reporters. I figured it was a good way to get my start, then I’d get to Washington in a couple of years. 

QH: It’s not a bad idea. Lots of reporters have math anxiety, so if you can dig into numbers you can be valuable in a lot of places.

RA: Yeah, it turned out there were a lot of jobs at that time if you could get past that phobia. My first job was for a small trade publication called Financial Services Week, which was a Fairchild publication, somehow a stepchild of Women’s Wear Daily. We covered financial planning. It was an awful job, I really hated it, so pretty soon I was looking for another gig. And, since now I was writing about finance, I ended up at a publication called Investment Dealer’s Digest, which put out a bunch of newsletters covering very “inside the industry” stuff. I started by covering mergers & acquisitions, just as the RJR/Nabisco deal was going on, a huge thing at the time. Then, boom, Drexel Burnham went bankrupt, everything went to hell, so then I got experience covering bankruptcy investing. 

QH: This is how specialties are born, how niches get made. 

RA: Exactly. I did basically the same thing at another newsletter after that, breaking a ton of stories on bankruptcies. You know you’re making it when The Wall Street Journal starts stealing your work. I befriended some of the reporters there, who tried to get me a job, and helped get my name around. I ended up at Forbes, which in those days had a famous and brilliant editor named Jim Michaels.

QH: Very smart, but he had a reputation for tearing up people’s copy with lots of nasty remarks. 

RA: Yup! There was a private file somebody set up, just outtakes of comments he’d put on people’s stories for everyone to see. Brutal stuff. But there was no denying that he made the writing better, too. If you lasted, you grew a thick skin and you got better as a reporter. I moved from a reporter/fact checker to, eventually, a columnist about Wall Street. That got me an offer from Institutional Investor Magazine, a great publication in its time. One of the best jobs in my career. 

Nothing lasts in journalism. Institutional Investor was sold to Cap Cities, which was bought by ABC, which was bought by Disney, which sold Institutional Investor to Euromoney. Got all that? It became a very different place, and I started networking to get to The New York Times. I made it there in 2000. Which, as you know, was just as the sky started to fall in. I covered money management and banking which was great, but 9/11 happened, the dotcom bubble popped, and the journalism industry started on its downward spiral. 

There were a lot of changes by 2005, and even though I wasn’t there that long I was kind of the old guard, and a new guard was moving in. The Times ultimately had to get financing from a billionaire, as  they were fumbled to move the paper to online. No hard feelings, I took a buyout.

QH: What did you do next?

RA:  Lots of magazines were hemorrhaging people, so that didn’t look stable. I figured, maybe this is as good a time as any to give something new a try.  I took a job at Ziff Brothers Investments, an institutional investment firm founded by the publishing family. I did a cover story about them when I was at Institutional Investor, and stayed in touch with them while at the Times. They stuck me on the media investment  team because they said, “You worked in the media, so you must know something about it.”

Working for them was pretty eye-opening. There were lots of Harvard MBA types who probably had way higher IQs than I did, but sometimes not as strong as far as EQ, the emotional awareness quotient. That allowed me to connect with people we were contacting as part of our research in a way that these investment professionals often could not.  

Soon after the market crashed in 2008 I got laid off. That’s when I had to decide, Where do I go from here? I thought about going back to journalism, but of course journalism was still finding its footing. 

QH: You can make a case that it still is.

RA: Yeah. I thought I might try Investor Relations, but they wouldn’t hire someone at my level who lacked experience. Then, I was hired to help someone working on a book, who suggested set up an LLC and looking for other consulting clients.

Soon after, I had another opportunity. I met someone who had a small investment office. She had me conduct due diligence on fund managers she might invest with, and interview former colleagues about their strengths and weaknesses. It was a consulting gig, but she gave me an office and a lot of hours, plus I could take other work on, time permitting. My work for her led to other clients, and I took on a mix of research, editing, as well as writing white papers. I did pretty much anything that drew on my core skills of writing, editing, reporting, and knowledge of the finance industry.

QH: This seems like a nice steady gig, with some creative satisfaction. It checks a lot of the boxes that journalism does.

RA: It worked initially because I had an office and a core number of hours. That was a healthy base, and a comfort zone to experiment on the margins. Eventually this person’s main client decided to shift their investments, which ended that gig. Freelancing became more anxiety provoking after that because I was constantly having to hustle

That’s when I was when I came across Blue Heron. I had heard about it through another journalist, and I reached out to the founder, David Rynecki, on LinkedIn. He founded Blue Heron about 20 years ago. He’d been a writer at Fortune, among other places, and like a lot of us he was affected by the industry downturn in the early 2000s. He took his buyout money and started a business, more power to him. I started working for them as a freelancer in 2012 and eventually moved in house.

QH: It seems like the culture you are working in, the atmosphere of a business, is a big thing with you. What’s it like at Blue Heron, and what is the work like?

RA:  Clients hire us to find out about things like the quality of the management team, the corporate culture, things that can really matter for long-term performance. Private and public companies. The core of the research team is former journalists, because there’s a big overlap of skills there. 

We have a standard template of questions, plus we follow up on specific things the client wants to know about. Sometimes, though, the value comes while probing what the client wants us to ask about, when the person you’re interviewing says something unexpected that’s of interest. That’s where the judgement comes in– knowing to follow that thread during the interview. You may not get a second chance. 

And yes, at Blue Heron the culture is much better than at many investment firms. A client might say, “I want you to do X,” or, “find me this information.” Then the team working on the project discusses what’s feasible, what is the most realistic approach.Then we summarize the work, and also give them full transcripts if they want to go deep.

QH: Between the work and the people, there does seem to be a certain “spirit of journalism” there. Do you ever miss being in the middle of breaking news, and other kinds of journalism?

RA: Sometimes when there’s a big event, a big news cycle, I can feel a little wistful. 

On the other hand, a few years after I started my freelance work, during the financial crisis, someone at a media company encouraged me to interview. They said I really should come back to journalism. I decided I wasn’t interested in that job, due to the crushing hours. I don’t miss the Inflexibility of a journalist’s hours. I remember being at The Times after my first child was born, and the day I got back from maternity leave I was put on a tough story with a tight deadline. Within a couple of weeks I was covering Elliot Spitzer’s big mutual fund investigation. Super exciting story, but I didn’t see my daughter a lot that first year and so. 

I like having control in my life. I work hard at Blue Heron, I’ll get on the phone at 9 PM if someone in Asia wants to talk. That’s not the same as having one breaking story after another in a hectic newsroom. I got married in November 2001, just before Enron went bankrupt. The weekend after we got married,  my husband went off to the gym, and when he got back I was gone, with just a post-it on our front door. See you when I see you. I don’t miss that.

I have ambitions about a book that I’ve been noodling at, maybe I can scratch the journalism itch  that way. Overall, though, it’s gratifying that I can tap into my  basic intellectual curiosity, being interested in other people’s experiences, and skill at building a sense of trust. When I’m doing that, I feel like I’m back to my roots as a journalist.

QH: What else did you learn as a journalist that you think is still professionally valuable?

RA: Learning to persevere is so valuable. When I left The Times I was worried that people wouldn’t pick up the phone when I called, but mostly that hasn’t been true. Of course, I started at smaller publications, so I learned some basic skills about engaging people and being persistent without making them want to hang up. 

You get that person to talk by tapping into the  feeling that  somebody wants to know what they have to say. It’s a classic reporting skill. Nowadays you study their profile on LinkedIn, look for things you might have in common, imagine the things they have done, find things you can ask about to build a little mutual interest and trust. It’s having an underlying curiosity about people generally, which any good reporter acquires. 

It’s a funny thing. I watched All the President’s Men again recently. Remember that part when they go door to door, and people keep closing their doors on Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford’s faces and they have to keep going? That hasn’t changed, at least in my work. We’re very above board, but we do try to explain how we hope they’ll talk to us, where we’re coming from, that we’re trying to help our clients make informed decisions given that our clients are  long-term investors. You try to express it in a way that has resonance to the person.