Brooke Masters: Gatekeeping the Financial Times opinion page, yacht-hopping on the fourth of July, and her front row seat at the Martha Stewart trial

Press Profiles: What's their story?

Welcome to the latest edition of the Press Profiles podcast, where we turn the tables on the top reporters, editors, and anchors in business news to hear their backstories, highlights of their careers, and their perspectives on the changing news industry. On this episode we speak with Brooke Masters, a 15-year veteran at the Financial Times. Currently, she is U.S. Investment and Industry editor, bringing her back to her hometown of New York City after 14 or so years in London. We'll talk about her multifaceted career at the Financial Times, her upbringing in New York City, a little college called Harvard, her book about Eliot Spitzer and his ups and downs, Martha Stewart, the New York Mets, and finally, I think the topic I am most interested in is, "How do you get an opinion piece placed in a major paper like the FT?" Brooke was the gatekeeper of the op-ed section at the FT for three years and that's kinda like being the head bouncer at a very exclusive nightclub. We'll talk about all that and a whole lot more. Here now is Brooke Masters on Press Profiles.

[You can listen to this episode by clicking the graphic above and follow along with the transcript below]               

BROOKE MASTERS:

I'm Brooke Masters, the investment and industry editor at The Financial Times, and this is Press Profiles.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

 Hi, Brooke.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Hi.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

 It's good to have you here.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Always a pleasure to talk.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Where should we start? How 'bout as the head bouncer, who gets in, who gets rejected? I know your official title was opinion and analysis editor for about three years. So tell me a little bit about how you figured out what made the cut and what didn't.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I think the thing you need to think about with the FT is we view ourselves a very select club. Unlike some of our competitors, we run a very small number of pieces every day, each one of which is carefully selected and actually relatively heavily edited to make sure that it is punchy, short, interesting, and makes sense for readers around the globe. So it's a much tougher club to get into I would say, first of all.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How many submissions would you get on any given day?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I used to get maybe 150 directly to me a day. And then there's probably another 100 or 50 into the generic email box. Those tend to be people coming from out of the blue. And we run fewer of them because they are people who often are completely unexpected.

Sometimes we mine the ore there for nuggets of gold, and there are some. I pulled some great ones out of the inbox, particularly in the height of lockdown when clearly everybody was bored so they all had op-eds to write. We were just drowning in proposals.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Makes getting into college look easy. So what stands out for you in that position? As you're looking through the pile what jumps out? Is it about being topical? Is it about catching your interest with a really interesting title or thesis?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I think a couple of things. We want pieces that are punchy, that make a strong argument. I'm not very interested (and I think my successor, Alice Fishburn isn't either), in pieces that are descriptive and rambling and just tell ya stuff's going on.

"Such and such is at a crossroads," is not an interesting op-ed. So we want punchy. We want pieces where the person writing has a reason to know what they're talking about. So we like people who have a dog in this fight or some expertise or a book they wrote about.

So a pitch that says, "I wrote a book about Queen Elizabeth and therefore it's relevant to this piece I wanna write about Prince Charles," that's much more useful than, "Here's a piece about Prince Charles." I think we want things that are short.

The FT is read by busy people and we deliberately keep our pieces shorter than most other places. The average piece runs somewhere between 650 and 750 words. We want pieces that say something that our internal columnists are not already saying.

We have an absolutely fabulous roster of columnists. And therefore, if you're gonna just say, "I agree with Martin Wolf," but do it in 1,100 rambling words that's not gonna cut it. We actually want you to be different. So have a point of view that isn't expressed elsewhere or where you have a real expertise that we do not have.

So we are very keen, for example, for CEOs who don't just say, "Wow, I'm cool, and I run a cool company," but make an argument like, "We want this policy change. Or this thing that has happened is goin' to completely revamp my industry. And I'm the CEO so you should listen to me."

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Yeah, I was wonderin' how much the organization or where the person's coming from matters, in terms of their affiliation. Is it a well-known place? Does it have a dog in the fight? So it sounds like it does impact. You may look at that byline pretty soon after looking at the piece.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Sure. Look, if you're former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who unfortunately just passed away, and you wanna write about refugees, I'm gonna take you. You are a former family of refugees and you're a former secretary of state. You're fabulous. And may I tell you, she's a great writer and easy to edit, was, absolute joy to work with.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

You worked with her?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Yeah. I edited a piece of hers on refugees actually. She was lovely.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How 'bout the editorial positioning of the paper and whether something fits with that or not? How do you manage that balance?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I think we are different than either The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, where they have an editorial position, and I would say they're offerings tend to follow that. They have a realm of what they consider acceptable. And especially The Wall Street Journal doesn't run things that are leftist. They have a view.

The Financial Times, our editorial position tends to be more centrist anyway I would say, although it's very European in sensibility. So, for example, things that would seem quite left in the U.S., which is that everybody oughta have health insurance, are accepted as normal because we're European in the end.

But we actually believe in pieces that provoke our audience. I definitely took the view that you should hear what people who disagree with you think. So we will run the occasional Chinese Revolutionary Army expert on why they could if they wanted to take over Taiwan or we will certainly run a bit of left and a bit of right on whether we should regulate banks more harshly.

There are beyond the pale things. You can't be racist. You can't call for nuclear war. You can't deny climate change I would say. You have to be true. But beyond that, we are not actually very prescriptive in terms of the ideology we take. And in fact, we make an effort, again, in getting voices that are different from our columnists. So if you have a position that is actually different from the paper's position we actually might be more interested rather than less.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So be punchy, have an interesting point of view, be coming from a position of expertise or interest, all makes sense. I will tell you that usually when you send these things in it's a black hole. You were always very responsive. You gave feedback and obviously pleasant in the process. So thank you for that. It does make a difference for lots of folks who are sending those in on a regular basis.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

We aim to please.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So let's take a step back. You grew up in New York City, born and raised in Manhattan. You went to Brearley and then Phillips Exeter, graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in '89 and then a masters of science in economic history from the London School of Economics. I will tell you we are not gonna compare college transcripts, okay? Very impressive all around. You join The Washington Post as a reporter in '89. Is that straight out of college?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I was a summer intern, and I never left.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Talk about how you landed the internship, what got you interested in reporting.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Well, I had arrived at college thinking I would play on the water polo team and maybe do a bit of reporting 'cause I had done both in high school and got in, and the-- The Crimson, which is the newspaper at Harvard is a very professional but also great fun organization.

And so you join, they call it, the Comp Class. There's an instruction period where you learn how to do it, and you have to write a certain number of articles, a certain number of weeks. And I loved it. It was fun. It was buzzy. College papers then, and I think still now, spend their profits (because they're nonprofit actually), on booze.

So there were parties. It was great fun. And meanwhile, it turns out I'm not that good at water polo, and so I was drowning in water polo. So I dropped off the water polo team. So there was no longer any competition. So I basically in four years of college-- my parents used to joke that they seemed to be paying for me to work at The Harvard Crimson.

I put 30, 40 hours a week all the time in at the newspaper. Loved it, absolutely loved it. And it was my social life a lotta the time as well. And because it's that kind of newspaper (it came out six days a week and the seniors edit the freshman and you just get better), you end up getting a fantastic on-the-job training.

And you also get advice from the older kids on where to apply. So I did summer internships. I did a political summer internship after freshman year 'cause I was debating whether I wanted to do something on the Hill. But after that I did an internship at The Jersey City Journal.

So I commuted out from my parents Manhattan home to Hoboken, which for me, frankly, was an education. I had never been to Hoboken before I got the job. And I loved it. Hoboken's great, such a fun place to be. And then the next summer I was an intern at Time Magazine.

And then the summer after I graduated I got The Washington Post internship. And the way internships work is there's kind of a hierarchy. You do little papers so you have clips that you can then show that you have some talent and then the bigger papers take you.

And I was lucky with Time 'cause after I did the Time internship, their Boston office was really short on bodies so they kept me on as sort of an occasional stringer. So I did things like-- this is years and years ago, but Bruce Springsteen was coming off a big layoff, so he hadn't been touring in, I don't know, 10 years maybe. And he did his first tour, and it started in Boston. And so they sent me to cover it. So I had clips like that (I did three inches), of copy in Time.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

That's a pretty good assignment.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Oh, it was fabulous, so cool.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Head over to the old Garden.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Absolutely.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

That's great. I was gonna ask you some of your favorite memories of some of the stories that stood out when you were at The Crimson. Was there anything that was super controversial that you wrote about while you were at The Crimson?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I think my best scoop by far was we discovered that the Kennedy School, which is the public policy school, as part of its fundraising had agreed with a donor to say, "You give us money and we will make you officers of the university," which means you get a staff card and you can have access to the cafeterias and-- but basically they were selling access.

And I hope this wasn't all that common, but for this donor we had the paperwork because an outraged student worker who had been forced to Xerox it was so outraged that he made an extra copy and I ended up with it. And so that was fun because it then led to a big investigation and a, "We don't do this. This was a one-off." I have no idea if it was a one-off, but it made clear you could not do this anymore. So that was very fun.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And does that type of story end up being covered in any of the other papers in Boston or--

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Oh, God, yes. The Globe covered it, The New York Times, all kinds of stu-- yes. It got massive pickup. It was really embarrassing for Harvard, which was really fun. That year I won the big journalism prize for a completely different, much mellower investigation. And actually it was a big joke around the office was that they knew that the best story of the year was that one, but they gave me a prize for something else so that they wouldn't have to give it to that.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Right. They were done talking about that story. So let's talk about The Washington Post. You joined there out of college. You stayed for 17 and a half years. That is an eternity at any job, but I think, especially in-- reporting jobs seem to be a little bit more transient. So that's pretty impressive. You must have, I would think, really enjoyed it and had an amazing experience there.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Absolutely loved it. I got hired by Ben Bradlee. I'm one of his last hires. He was sort of moving towards retirement, so when they lined me up to do the interviews the managing editor, who became the executive editor, Len Downie, had already approved me.

And so everyone's like, "Wear really nice clothes. Dress really well. Look like you know what you're talking about. Ben likes to be sure that we're hiring the right people." Basically, as long as I didn't piss him off I was gonna get the job, but, God, we were all terrified because Ben has very, very strong opinions.

But it was a lovely interview. And apparently I had worn the right clothes so it was all fine. So I got hired by Ben. The Washington Post is an amazing place. David Broder's was five rows away. And Bob Woodward on every fourth Sunday used to run the paper, and (I think because he knew everybody was so jealous of how famous he was), he would buy us all ice cream if you were on Sundays then.

The paper itself is brilliant, or the news organization is, and remains brilliant obviously. My first job was way, way, way out in Virginia. I was where the suburbs meet the South. And so they sent little Manhattan girl out to meet the South. And I covered the local Virginia politics, not state-wide even, county politics. It was a huge education for me because I had spent almost no time in the South. I had spent almost no time in the suburbs. I had no idea what life in the suburbs were like.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

When you think back what was the benefit of being thrust out of the city, out of the mainstream, as it relates to developing you as a journalist in terms of finding stories? But also there's a little bit of, I would think in that situation, where you where you need to learn how to gain the interest of the headquarters, people back in D.C. They're looking at stories and you have to figure out, "Okay, this is newsworthy or that's newsworthy or this is how I can get their attention." And so tell us a little bit about how that helped hone your skills at an early age.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Two things about being thrust way out there were first off, I had to learn to listen and get quotes and communicate with people who-- who I had very little in common with. I learned very early on that I may not agree with them, I may not understand them, but these people have interesting things to say.

Early in 1993, right after Bill Clinton was elected, my assignment during the inauguration was to shadow the Operation Rescue people, who are the way out there abortion people. And they had come to town to protest. And they were chaining themselves to abortion clinics, and they had big marches, and they absolutely hated everything that Bill Clinton stood for.

And so my job was just to be with them in case they threw pig's blood at somebody and also just to cover them. And I spent a week with people with whom I had politically nothing in commmon with, and they were mostly from the Midwest, which again I had very little in common with.

But I made friends with them. I learned about them. I also learned to respect why they were doing this. And I think the-- the success from that was that I learned how to capture the voice and let people make their best case. 'Cause I think one of the things in journalism, there's an, "Oh, we have to quote both sides," but it's not just, "Let's quote both sides."

Each side should make its best case. And you have to help them. If somebody's not particularly articulate or they are assuming that you know things (this happens with experts all the time), you have to draw them out and help them make their best case.

And that's really good journalism because then the reader gets what you want. And then in terms of story selection, it is a matter of trying to find things that capture people's attention. One of the things we used to get done because Mrs. Graham and also Len Downie had a thing about the weather, that the weather is one of the things that everybody lives with.

So the weather story would get assigned out and it cycled around 'cause everybody hates the weather story. You're writing, "It's sunny. It's hot. It's raining. It's sleeting. It's something." But when you were in the nowheresville suburbs that nobody really cares about your one chance to get on the front page is to write a really good weather story.

It's probably your best shot for two months if it's your turn to do the weather story. So finding a way to write about how hot it is that's colorful and lively and captures something gets you a front page story, which I didn't get very many for a while.

And so it was my best shot. So I definitely learned strong language, great quotes, vivid, vivid writing, picking the details. It's not just hot but it's salt coagulating on your neck hot or whatever. I got sent out to do the July Fourth fireworks.

Again, how exciting is it to cover the fireworks? Not at all because they happen every year. There are still fireworks. Unless some kid blows themselves up nobody cares. But I got sent-- who knew this, but it turns out all these boats go out on the Potomac River in Washington to watch the fireworks.

So I stood on the dock and started interviewing people there. And somebody said, "Oh, come along." And so I ended up on some yacht. And it turns out all the yachts tie up to each other so it's like a big floating party and you walk from yacht to yacht.

There are smaller boats and normal people too. But I invited myself on something like 30 yachts and got great quotes about these people in the middle of the river and their fabulous yachts. And so I get myself onto the front page with a completely stupid story but had great color. And I would rather have had Fourth of July with my family, but if I wasn't gonna do that it was about as good as it got.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

But clearly resourceful, looking at the situation and being like, "Okay, how do I make this into something when it's really probably not?"

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Yes. And to be fair, I had a really good editor who suggested the boats. But once I was on the boats I did the charming, "Oh, what a wonderful boat you have," and, "Of course I'd love to try your fried chicken." And it's not fake, in that I really, really like to meet people and learn about them.

And so it's conveying that. This is a really dumb example, but I always tell the younger reporters, 'cause I've done a lotta training by now, "When you interview people on the phone smile while you talk. People can hear you smile. They won't know that's what they're hearing, but they will hear friendly. And you get much better quotes out of people and you get much better rapport if you smile."

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Such good advice. Let's talk about a couple of other major stories. In February, March time-frame of 2004 you're sent to cover the Martha Stewart trial. For those that don't know, Martha Stewart was charged with trading on insider information.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

No, it's complicated with Martha.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Isn't that what she was accused of?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Martha was accused of trading on inside information--

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

But convicted of something else.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Convicted of something else and never criminally charged with it either. She wasn't acquitted. She just was never charged with it.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So, well, I'll let you tell the story.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

So Martha Stewart had a broker with whom she had a very close relationship. He was very stylish, and I think they knew each other from parties. She shared the broker with a man named Sam Waksal, who was the CEO of a biotech firm called ImClone.

And the broker, Peter Bogdanovic, was the broker for both of them. And Sam's company had this drug that was gonna save the world. I think it was a cancer drug. It had gone to the FDA, and it was in trial for approval. And if it got approved he was gonna make oodles and oodles of money.

However, it didn't get approved. It failed. And in the 48 hours between when Sam was told that it had failed and when it was publicly announced, Sam sold a ton of stock. He went to jail for this. There's no question. This is criminal. You are not allowed to sell stock when you know that your drug is worthless and the rest of the world does not. Definitely not cool.

So Sam's selling stock. And best anyone can tell what happened, Sam's selling stock through Peter and Peter calls Martha and says, "Sam's selling stock." Nobody actually taped that phone call so we don't know exactly what Peter said to Martha. But Peter called Martha, and suddenly Martha's selling stock.

And so Martha sold a buncha stock. And so dust settles, they announce the drug stinks, and these guys have had some really timely trades. SEC and the FBI are not happy. They do an investigation. They charge Sam. Sam goes to jail. They invite Martha in for an interview.

And Martha does many things but is stonewalled. And she basically claims, "No, no, no. Peter and I talked about rebalancing my portfolio. It was an end-of-year thing. I just happened to be selling this," which is-- I don't give legal advice, but it's not a great excuse.

The SEC believes she is lying. People do lie to the SEC. They're stupid. But then at the end of the interview, and I really think this was crucial, as they're getting ready-- she has just told a bunch of pretty unbelievable stories to the SEC, she’s-- turns to the SEC lawyers and says, "Can I go? I have a business to run."

At which point I think-- they would never admit this, but the agents are just like, "All right, lady. You've just lied to us. You've just been obnoxious to us. You're toast." Again, they would never admit to this, but they did testify to the, "I have a business to run," line on the stand.

So they don't charge her with the insider trading. They charge her with obstruction of justice for that line about, "Oh, no, no, no. Peter and I were just rebalancing my profile." So she goes on trial. She gets charged. She is the hottest thing since sliced bread if you are in the decorative world back then.

She has a TV show. She has a magazine. I grew up reading her entertaining book, which told you how to throw a wedding for 500 people and cook it all yourself. There were 35 TV stations outside the courthouse. There were networks from Japan. There were networks from Saudi Arabia.

The lineup of people tryin' to get passes to this trial-- you had to apply for passes months in advance. And luckily, I had been covering this courthouse and all the other cases brought by this office for years. And so there were probably 15 of us who were regulars, and so we had automatic passes.

So there was us and then there were all these other people who had no idea what was goin' on. Other classic things that Martha did, Martha arrives for her trial, at which she's gonna present herself as a person of the people who's being picked on by the government, and she's carrying her Birkin handbag.

This a $15,000 handbag. I know nothin' from handbags, let me tell you, but when you run a story if you're the reporter they'll send you the pictures like, "Do you know who this is standing next to her so we can write the caption?" And I happened to be lookin' at the pictures when the fashion editor, who had the next office over from mine, walks by and she's like, "What's Martha doin' carryin' a Birkin?"

And there's a story. So Robin, the fashion editor, wrote this fantastic column about Martha and her Birkin. And in the end Martha got convicted. The thing that's sad is I do think she was poorly legally advised. Instead of putting her up in front and being interviewed by the SEC, if they had immediately said, "Oh, my God. He told me to sell.

I didn't realize that was inside information. I am so sorry. Can I pay a fine? Can I donate to charity?" Because I actually know because I talked to the guy who made the charging decision on the actual insider trading decision, it's borderline.

If your broker says, "Somebody else is selling," unless you absolutely know why they are selling, it's not clear that that's legally a violation. Lying about why you sold is clearly a violation. She could've avoided the whole thing if when they called her she said, "Oh, my God. I'm so sorry. Can I donate a million dollars to your favorite charity?"

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So interesting. I actually talk a lot about this because I think it's relevant to my world, but I coined or speak of something called the Martha Stewart Principle. And to me it's about the importance of building good will. You've just reaffirmed what I've always thought.

You have more detail than I knew, but I always assumed (because of all of the reporting and stories and second-hand accounts that I'd been aware of), that she wasn't very nice at different times. She did not build up any good will. And in terms of building good will with colleagues, associates, competitors, I think you see time and time again when you're accused of doing something wrong if you've built up good will over time you're gonna get the benefit of the doubt. And if you haven't you won't. And so I always point to that situation, the Martha Stewart Principle. If you have a lotta good will you'll probably get the benefit of the doubt. And if you have not built that up you probably won't.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Completely agree with you. The other thing they did during the trial was put lots of people on the stand who conveyed the sense that she was privileged and nasty and mean, and she clearly wouldn't have just ceded to her broker what stock she wanted because she was bossy and annoying.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Let's talk about another topic that you covered at The Post and then came with you as you went over to The Financial Times and that's the rise of Eliot Spitzer, which you actually wrote a book about Eliot Spitzer, Spoiling for a Fight it was called, I think in 2006.

And at the time he's the New York State attorney general. He's well known because he's taken on Wall Street in a variety of ways: global research settlement, mutual fund timing investigation. I think he went after the insurance companies as well. He's gonna run for governor. Everyone's thinkin', "This guy is a crusader." Wall Street hates him. Main Street loves him. You decide to write a book on him. What prompted you to write the book?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

A couple of things. He was part of my job. I was covering his cases. And I have to say, I have a real soft spot for taking on industries when they rip off lots of people, particularly actually small amounts from lots of people because it's very hard to hold people accountable.

And he did a great job, not just of himself holding people accountable but also of embarrassing the Washington establishment (which had been overlooking some of this stuff), and making them be more aggressive. And famously in the research settlement, which is if you remember back in dot com, these Wall Street analysts at places like Morgan Stanley and Citigroup and Merrill Lynch, most famously, would get on TV and talk about what fabulous companies these were.

And we should all buy them. They were revolutionizing the world. And it is true that some of them, say, Amazon, were revolutionizing the world. The rest of them were utter crap. And what he did is he went and asked for all the emails that those same analysts had been writing privately among themselves and looked at them.

And of course here's, Henry Blodget, who's the person who got in the most trouble for this, although to be fair, he was never tried with anything wrong. He never actually lied. But he would get on TV and say, "This is a brilliant company."

And there would be these emails where he refers to them as a P.O.S., a dog. And so it made clear that what the analysts were doing (at the behest of their bosses at the bank), was selling this stuff to Main Street America. I loved the fact that he was doing that.

And so I was really interested in it. And so I was covering all his cases, which were making tremendous news. And I actually wrote a profile of, "Who is this guy, and how is he able to turn this New York attorney general job into such a crusading role?"

And I actually got a call from an agent saying, "You know, that would make a book, and I could sell it for you." And so I was at the time the mother of two small children, who was absolutely exhausted all the time. I was so tired, and my commute was killing me.

And so I wrote the book proposal on the train. I would write two paragraphs on the train out and two paragraphs on the train in every day until I got the thing done. And then I pitched it. And then I got enough of an advance ('cause that's how the world worked back then), that I could take six months off and work from home. And so I honestly did it partly 'cause he's really interesting (and I love legal cases and I have a definite soft spot for anything that involves legal cases), but also just to spend time with my kids.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

It's a great book. He is a rising star. Everyone's thinkin', "This guy can be the next president." And then in 2008 the roof caves in. The book is out just a little bit, he's governor of New York State, and he gets caught up in a scandal, a sting operation, charged with hiring prostitutes. His world comes crashing down. He resigns. He's gone from politics shortly thereafter. How shocked were you (and maybe how disappointed were you), in that whole situation?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I was shocked. What's really interesting about him is, for a guy who got taken down by hiring prostitutes, he actually had a huge number of very strong female staff members and a very strong wife, now ex-wife. So he was not a guy that you looked at immediately and thought, "This guy has women problems."

I mean, there are some people who have women problems. I covered a county official who used to enjoy throwing peanuts down the shirts of his staff at happy hour. That guy would not have been a shocker if he'd been hiring prostitutes. So I was really shocked that it was this.

I will say, and I did not remember this until someone found it for me, that when I was promoting the book I did a panel on C-SPAN about, "Where do you think Eliot Spitzer will be in four years," and by the time I did the panel he was already governor.

And he was already pushing all kinds of boundaries as governor. He had been accused (I don't think it ever got sorted out 'cause he left office), of misusing his control over the state police to investigate his rivals. It never got sorted, but he was under investigation for that.

And so I think I'd been asked about that. And I said, "Probably 50/50 he'll either be running for president or he'll be gone and in incredible trouble." So he was somebody who the rules did not apply to him. He believed he was doing it for good, but he definitely did push every boundary.

He also was in an interesting time. At the time he was New York's attorney general, Republicans controlled everything in Washington. This is George W. Bush. And so if you were an energetic, financially literate person who wanted to do something about Wall Street being too powerful and you were a Democratic, you were on that end, there was nowhere to go except to Eliot Spitzer.

And so he attracted this amazing group of people as well. And so I think that was part of it. I mean, I'm very sad that the things he was trying to accomplish went down with him. He did show the way because every New York attorney general since then who have-- frankly, they all have a terrible record.

The hit list of how many of them have gone down is just scary. But they do realize now that that role is one where you, as a democrat, 'cause New York almost always elects Democrats, can do things and can influence financial services in a way that can be good for little people.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

It's really interesting. I was covering politics up in Albany when he was the attorney general, and I remember he'd be doing the fun run and other types of things. He was very personable and always around. Then I'm at Bear Sterns and I'm helping promote the equity research analysts, so he's-- comes after the equity research team.

Then in 2008, the week Bear Sterns was blowing up, it was a Monday afternoon, our stock is down probably $5, $10, and all of a sudden the news comes out he's arrested. And everyone forgets about Bear Sterns. So he gave us about 24 hours of a reprieve, which was kind of nice. Unfortunately, the rest of the week did not go so well. So there's these Eliot Spitzer parallels that (LAUGH) are going through these memory points for me when you're telling the story.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

That was an amazing thing when he got caught. I was in London by then, and I was actually covering financial services and also madly running around as, in the U.K., things were going down with some of the local banks.

So we were all incredibly busy. And then this comes out. And I can remember Japanese TV came and interviewed me at my house 'cause I was like, "I've got the kids. It's 10:00 at night. I can't"-- and they're like, "Oh, please." And I burnt the kids' dinner because I was on the phone too much. It was total chaos. It was not a good work/life balance week. But it is too bad. But maybe it takes somebody like that to take on establishments. I don't Know.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

So in 2006 you make the jump to the FT, and a year later you're in London. So you spent your whole world, pretty much New York, Cambridge, Mass, then obviously in Washington we talked about being in the suburbs. But then you move to London and 17 years at The Washington Post and now 15 or so years in London for the FT. How was that transition, picking up, moving your family, going there, and living a life that was foreign up until then?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

was really lucky, in that my husband and I worked a joint transfer so we both came over with our same employers. And interestingly, we're both still with the same employers when we came back. We got there and the U.K. is different. It feels like it ought to be the same because everyone speaks the same language, allegedly.

And then people start talking and you realize you absolutely don't understand what each other are talking about. My first assignment when I got to London was on the FT's Lex column, which is our financial commentary column. Actually you don't get a byline, but it's very, very widely read, particularly actually in the U.K. and in Europe.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Would you say it's kind of the Page Six of the business world?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Yeah, kind of. What's interesting about it, it has now been imitated everywhere. So Heard on the Street is The Wall Street Journal copy. And Breaking Views is the copy that was actually founded by people who spun out of the FT. So, yes, it is 300 snappy words about what's going on.

And it was actually great to land in the Lex column 'cause it's a bit of a cocoon, in that your name's not on it. The people around you know more than you do. It was a taste of how different and small the world is in London in some ways, where I think I was covering a supermarket result.

There was some number I did not understand. And so I call up the PR and said, "This number is not making sense to me. Can you find somebody who can just walk me through it?" Five minutes later the CFO is on the phone. "The Lex column doesn't understand their number. This is bad."

And so I had to learn to say, "No, I really don't want the CFO. I actually just want some geek who can spend five minutes running me through this." The other thing that was interesting is the U.K. is a place where-- my husband always says, "500 miles is like 500 years in the U.K."

Everything is really close together there. So when we drove to Hadrian's Wall for a long weekend, which is only about 500 miles-- my husband's from the Midwest. I have driven to Minnesota and back in a week. So Hadrian's Wall for a long weekend seemed perfectly reasonable to me.

You would have thought I had said I had driven to Hawaii. "That's not physically possible. You couldn't do that." While we were living in London we lived two different places. Our second house was built in the 1850s. And people refer to it as new.

"That's relatively new build." And so it's just a different world. The world grew together while we were there. We got there and the only place you could get canned pumpkin to make pumpkin pie was at Harrods' foreign food section. So you had to make a trek to Harrods to make pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving when we first got there. By the end my local bakery was making pumpkin pie. So it was interesting watching the world grow together.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

What about the difference of covering news in the U.K. versus the U.S.? you talked a little bit about it, but how is it different just in terms of chasing down stories? What's newsworthy versus what isn't newsworthy in one place versus the other?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

It's a small country. 60 million versus 350 million is a radically different thing. The FTSE 100 is 100 companies, and the smallest ones are relatively small by U.S. standards, versus the S&P 500. When I was doing U.S. stuff you don't get out of bed for companies worth less than $5 billion dollars. And now it's much higher.

One of my early jobs-- I had a job created for me, where I was on Lex and then the financial crisis starts to happen and they realize they want someone with expertise in how companies deal with the world when they're in trouble. I had covered Enron and WorldCom and all that stuff.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Is that kind of, like, a regulatory--

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

There was a regulatory beat later, but the regulatory beat at that moment was full. And so they couldn't move me into regulatory because there was a perfectly good person doing it. But there was a hole so they created a job for me where I was covering small brokers and asset managers.

And it was described as how companies interact with the city (which is the word we would use for Wall Street), how the markets view companies and how they deal with each other. And at this moment, when everything was going bust and the banks were going bust, people were very suspicious.

But I'm covering companies that have a hundred million pounds in earnings. This is the kinda thing I wouldn't even bother to read the press release on in the U.S., yet these people, some of them, have an enormous amount of influence because they've been there forever and they all know each other and it's a very small world.

Here's a really great example of how different the culture is there. The regulatory reporter, who was lovely, went off to Hong Kong I think and they created a chief regulatory job for me so I could do cross-cultural things. So I did U.S. and U.K. and comparative to that stuff.

Part of my U.S. job was covering what was then the Takeover Panel, which rules on whether people have behaved badly in takeovers, in M&A deal, and also the Financial Services Authority. And so two things happened. The Financial Services Authority, which is the equivalent of-- it's the SEC and the FDIC kinda rolled into one.

The FSA puts out a press release that they are, "Very disappointed," and I put that in quotes in something about something. And I was like, "That's nice." I didn't even cover it. And luckily my boss, who knew I had a blind spot on this sort of thing 'cause I was American, came up and said, "Very disappointed is a big deal in the U.K.

"That's section front story. That they are very disappointed means they're mad." And I was like, "Really? There's no fine? They're just very disappointed?" And he was like, "Brooke, write it." And so I'm calling the lawyers and everyone's like, "Oh, my God. They may never get another deal again."

So there's that, the cultural British understatement. And then the other one that happened, similarly, the Takeover Panel was very upset with the fact that when Cadbury got taken over by what is now Mondelez, but it was Kraft at the time, they had promised to keep a certain number of jobs open, and then they didn't.

They basically shut down factories and laid off workers, the classic American thing. And the Takeover Panel-- basically, the biggest punishment they have is called a cold shoulder. They cold shoulder you. There's no fine. Everybody in the city is supposed to give you a cold shoulder and not give you business. That's not a regulatory punishment. A cold shoulder? But, yes, it is a regulatory punish-- and it's a big deal. They were really mad.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And it works.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I don't think it really affected Kraft that much, but I think within the British confines it does work. And they've had to rethink because so many FTSE 100 companies now are really multinational and really don't care. So they've had to rethink. But again, it's a world where it was very clubby. And so things were run that way.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

I like it. Very disappointed and the cold shoulder. Those are two damning reactions from the regulators. Now you're comin' home to New York City. Tell us about the new role.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I am covering non-bank finance. I'm the team leader for non-bank finance. So I'm working with the reporters who cover private equity, hedge funds, asset managers. My personal job is the largest of the traditional asset managers, BlackRock, PIMCO, Franklin Templeton world.

Fidelity and Vanguard are not listed, but obviously we're really interested in them. And I have been arguing (really since my days as a regulatory reporter), that the reforms that came through after the financial crisis have pushed a lot of the really interesting financial engineering and risk out of banks and into other corners of the financial markets.

And so I think a lot of the really interesting stuff that is going on is happening outside the banks. And so I have argued for a long time that we should be spending more time on the non-bank finance people. And so it's my chance to put my money where my mouth is.

I also, as a condition of coming, got to keep my opinion column. As you mentioned, I used to be the opinion editor, and I write an every-other-week column about corporate news more broadly. And obviously, opinion and news are slightly awkward to marry. And you have to be careful about that.

So the opinion column is focused much more broadly on corporates. Last week I wrote about shrinkflation. It's not about the asset managers. I think you will be unlikely to find me writing about asset manager business models or something in a column because the columns are pretty spiky and opinionated.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Excited to move back to New York City or trepidation?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

It's interesting. I really wanted to come back to the U.S. I have always-- in 15 years I never moved my pension or any of that. So I still have a 401(k). My husband and I shared a U.S. phone number, so when we came back we immediately had a phone number.

So we have always known we would come back. I mean, we're both American. Our kids are in university here. Our parents are here. And so I'm glad to be back for that reason. My daughter's in school in California, and so it was almost impossible to talk to her. Eight hours is just brutal. Three just feels like a joy.

Although I am a native New Yorker, I was really happy in Washington. I was really happy in London. I am not one of those classic New Yorker cover New Yorkers where everything beyond New York is just gray and dull. I actually in some ways like to visit New York more than I like to live in it, which may be why I'm living in the suburbs up along the Hudson River and actually looking out the window at it. There is nothing like New York. It is a one-off. I've spent time in most of the world's big cities, at least the financial capitals, and New York has an energy. It has a self-centeredness. It has a buzz that you don't get other places.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

As someone who's been in this industry for so long, when you look back and reflect (and I'm sure you're doing a lot of reflecting and reminiscing as you come back to New York), how has the industry changed over the years? And to that end, where are we going?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Well, we've lost a lot of the really good local papers. A model for news-- maybe Axios' efforts to come back with Axios Local will bring some of it back. But we've lost people who hold local businesses and government accountable. They're just basically gone.

And that's really bad. And it's also bad because those were the places where people learned how to be journalists, so proper go-out-and-talk-to-people journalists. I think the growth of online and the growth of blogging and of personality-driven writers, there's very spiky writing and there's a much broader range of people who do it because, frankly, being a small-town journalist, reporter, is not something you can do if you have lots of student debt or anything.

I think in some ways the writing is better but the reporting is worse. To really break a scandal, dig up news, you have to spend a lotta time learning how to do it. It's not natural. You can't wake up one day and suddenly break Watergate. And so I think that's really problematic, is whether we are losing the skills we need.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And is there too much of a rush to try to get that, to try to get that scandal, to try to get that without doing the proper work behind it?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Yeah, I think because people don't have the experiences. What does it mean to really nail it? People are happy to write a half-finished, not really proven, innuendo-filled blog. And that's a problem because of two things. One, it discredits the media if it isn't fully there and also, frankly, sometimes people are innocent and they didn't do it and there is an explanation.

It doesn't mean that there isn't still really great journalism going on. For example, my colleague Dan McCrum's take-down of Wirecard, which took him years and years and years was thorough and perfect. I edited the very first story that he wrote for the main paper about Wirecard and must have been seven years ago.

And he was convinced then it was all a fraud, but he didn't have it. So we did it in little bites. So there is great journalism that gets done. I think the other thing is because people don't have the training there also is a tendency to do a lot of access journalism, where somebody gives you an interview so you write down everything they say.

I do it too. This week I interviewed Bill Gross (who used to run PIMCO and is one of the great investment managers of the 20th century and the early part of the 21st), and I basically wrote down what he said, which was great fun. But that's sort of candy.

That's not bread and butter journalism. Bread and butter journalism is calling 15 people and checking a buncha numbers and looking for change and reading repor-- and if it's financial journalism it's reading people's results and figuring out what's in there. And I think if you don't take the time to do that you end up writing really superficial stuff.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

All right. Let's finish off with some quick hits. Is that okay?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Sure.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Music. Favorite type of music? Favorite artist? We had a Springsteen reference earlier. I don't know if that--

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Well, I do love Springsteen. When I was younger it was Madonna. I wrote a column about her. But I have a complete soft spot for Broadway musicals, both of the old Oklahoma variety and of the new Hamilton variety. I love 'em all. Take my kids to them. And London was a great place for that. I still love ABBA, dance around the kitchen cooking.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

My colleague, Mark Snyder, has a very good podcast on Madonna where they break down each song. So I'll send you that so you can enjoy that.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Ooh, I'd love that.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

How 'bout favorite sport, favorite sports team?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Baseball and the Mets. When the Mets traded Tom Seaver in the 1970s I locked myself in the bathroom and cried. And when they finally won in '86 that was unbelievable.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

'77, that was a tough year. What are your thoughts on Stevie Cohen? That's sort of mixing both your worlds. Hedge fund manager coming to save the Mets.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

It's complicated. I covered the bit where his hedge fund got in trouble with the SEC and he agreed not to manage money for a while. Yeah, it's interesting. He's a very interesting man. And I want the Mets to do well, so I hope it's a good combo.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Favorite movie?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Casablanca.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

What's streaming in the Masters' home these days?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I'm finishing Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, the fourth season. My kids stream the Criterion Movie Channel. They're very arty. They like Persona and Tarkovsky movies and things that actually I really fall asleep in. So they stream a lotta that. And actually my husband is still a creature of regular TV. He likes flippin' the channels.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Is there a dream job for you, maybe not this life but maybe the next life?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Oh, I always wanted to cover the Supreme Court. Actually I was the second choice at The Post relatively soon before I left and didn't obviously stick around to do it. And the FT doesn't have a full-time Supreme Court job. It's folded into something else. So I don't think I will ever get to do it. But, oh, I really wanted to do that.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Sports, music, literature, art, where are you spending your free time?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Reading literature and some crappy books as well. I have a soft spot for historical romances. When the world is getting me down I go retreat to the 19th century. I like classical music, and my husband has recently invested in really good stereo sound so we have been listening to opera and classical music. Not so much sport yet. I was definitely not a cricket and rugby person. So I'm still getting reintegrated. I will go see my beloved Mets.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Besides the FT, where are you getting your news these days?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Gotta watch Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal 'cause they're my biggest competitors. I read some New York Times, some Washington Post, little bit of Economist. They do really good step-back stuff. Some of the more focused things. I read The Information, which does tech coverage, a few Substack columnists that I think are quite good.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Hearing more and more about The Information. I'm gonna have to start paying attention. What is your aim when you're reporting? Inform, explain, expose, entertain? What do you think is your number one aim?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

It's always fun to expose, but the reality is I don't think-- having edited reporters who are born investigative reporters, I am not one. I am more an inform and explain person, in that I think my best gifts are telling people why it is they care about something and putting things in context. Probably comes partly from having been a history major. I like to see how things fit together, and I like to tell people stuff.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Most memorable story you covered during your career? Maybe it was the Martha Stewart, but anything else that--

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

I gotta pick Earl. Earl Washington was a mentally-handicapped person who got wrongly convicted of murder and sent to death row. And by the time I took over covering his case he had already been moved off death row because there was enough doubt about his conviction.

But we did a whole bunch of investigating and as did The Virginian-Pilot and embarrassed the state of Virginia into finally giving a DNA test. And of course it proved he was innocent, and he got out of jail. We got him out of jail. And that was just brilliant.

There were lawyers who worked so hard on that. It's not like I did it, but covering that-- and as part of that I did a second set of investigations about the way Virginia's rules of evidence work, which at the time made it very, very, very hard for people who'd been wrongly convicted to get anybody to look at the fact they'd been wrongly convicted.

And we wrote a whole series of the really horrible things that had happened, and we embarrassed the Virginia Supreme Court into basically saying it was going to change the rules of evidence if the legislature didn't. And the legislature changed the rules.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Talk about making an impact. If an executive's gonna meet with you they'll often ask, "What's she like? What's her reporting style? Is she investigative? Is she friendly? Is she tough? Does she love stories?" What should we tell them when they're about to meet with Brooke Masters?

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

All of the above actually. I think I am tough. At the same point, I think I am not mean and-- because I have this interest in having everybody make their best case, as I don't come in automatically negative. On the other hand, I definitely view part of my role is to hold the powerful to account.

I am not gonna go in and say, "Tell me about your childhood," and, "Isn't it too bad that somebody was mean to you when you own $8 billion." I think the thing that annoys me is people who make assertions and can't back them up. So if you're gonna say, "X is happening," you oughta know what the heck you're talkin' about.

Don't be readin' off cue cards. Classically, this happens to every Washington journalist, you need a quote from a senator about something. You work with the PR and they put them on the phone, and some senators are clearly reading their cue cards.

You can hear it. And some of them actually get into a conversation with you. And the cue card people really annoy me. And so I would try not to cover them. They often were very good quotes 'cause they'd been written for them and they were nicely done. But then you'd get into an actual conversation with the ones who care. So I think that's the thing that bothers me most, is people who can't be bothered to know what they're talking about.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

And finally, to sum it up, we all love writing and thinking of headlines. Give me the headline on your career.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Wow, headline of my career…

RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Cold shoulder?

BROOKE MASTERS:

Cold shoulder (laughs) no.

RUSSELL SHERMAN:

She has a nose for the news.

BROOKE MASTERS:

Yeah, it’s a little cliché. It’s hard because I spent ten years editing. I have high standards, that’s. High standards, you know “Hard news and high standards.”

RUSSELL SHERMAN:

Hard news and high standards. Excellent. We'll leave it at that. Brooke, thank you for joining me. So much fun to hear your stories. Congratulations on just a great career and obviously lots more to come. Welcome back (MUSIC) to New York City. Good luck with the Mets. Hopefully it's an okay season. But again, thanks for joining me.

                                     BROOKE MASTERS:

Thanks for having me. It was great fun.

                                     RUSSELL SHERMAN:

That is Brooke Masters, everyone. Remember she is just one of the many interesting and impressive people you will learn about on Press Profiles. You can find all of the conversations at pressprofilespodcast.com. and of course you can subscribe wherever it is that you subscribe to podcasts. Thanks for listening. We will see you next time.