Questionnaire for Journalists: Chuck Jaffe, “Money Life with Chuck Jaffe”
ERPR’s series, “Questionnaire for Journalists,” features members of the media and asks about their lives and careers.
Chuck Jaffe, “Money Life with Chuck Jaffe”
I spoke with Chuck Jaffe, syndicated financial columnist and host of Money Life with Chuck Jaffe and former columnist for MarketWatch.
How did you first get into journalism? What was your first job in journalism?
My parents moved from Illinois to New Jersey at the end of second grade, and I didn’t know anybody. We moved right before school ended and although I went to a couple of days of school in New Jersey, I kind of had a summer of nothing to do. So I taught myself how to type on my Dad’s old manual typewriter. And then my Dad was in the sound business so he had things that were the basics of a recording studio in our own basement…and so first it was typing out scripts as if I was doing a ballgame, and then I realized I didn’t really need to scripts …and I would just start recording over ballgames.
There was always that interest. I wound up when I was in high school going to Northwestern’s National High School Institute for Journalism, and quite honestly, I have one skill set. I’m not sure I’m good at anything else, it’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. I think I’m the classic case of the kid who was already interested in it when we had “All the President’s Men.” This is really all I want to do and it’s a job that’s almost never felt like a job, and when it does it’s because I’ve ventured into something that’s not in my normal comfort zone.
The first time I was paid to be a writer I was 14 years old, and I was stringing for the Newark Star Ledger. I lived in Livingston, and the town paper was the West Essex Tribune, and I had this interest when I was pretty young. They did something where they took us in to see the guy who ran the West Essex Tribune…and he said “Oh by the way if you want to do things, we’re always looking for things, if you want to cover or if you want to write we’d be happy to have you do it.” They weren’t paying anything, but I said “I’m interested in doing this.”
He said, “well you go to Heritage Junior High school, across the street there’s the school board and we need people to sometimes cover their meetings.”
And I said, “well I don’t know if I’ll understand it,” and he said, “well why don’t you go and find out.’”
So I went to whatever the school board meeting was — it wasn’t that hard to ask questions and figure out what I was going to do for like three paragraphs. While I was there, a man asked me “what are you here for,” and I said, “I guess I’m here to do a story for the West Essex Tribune.”
He said, “are they paying you for that story?” and I said I didn’t really know.
So he said, “I work with the Newark Star Ledger, and if you can actually write then we would pay you to cover events like this one.’
Two weeks later, I got a call asking me…if I could cover the next school board meeting. So I rode down on my bicycle and I rode home in the dark with my little bike light on and I wrote them something and I called it in and they paid me $35…I did a few stories for them, but then I was a dedicated freelancer from then on.
Chuck Jaffe (photo courtesy of Chuck Jaffe)
How do you decide what you write or publish?
How I decide what to do for my column is very different from how I decide what to do for my show. The column is usually reasonably well-thought out, it’s a subject I want to talk about…I’m typically writing about things that I think will interest folks, that maybe will have a little bit of a different point of view to them, and I’m looking at both big issues and esoteric…I’m always looking at statistics and studies, trying to figure out where people fit in and what you could do to come up with better ways to do things…Find me the right story and it can literally tickle my fancy. If it does, and I think it’s appropriate for my audience, I’ll write about anything.
When it comes to my show, I tell people often that it’s easy to get on my show once, it’s not very easy to get on more than once because you have to be good at it. We do long form interviews with really smart people and you’re probably going to have to prove to me that you’re smart…I try to value the seat that’s opposite me…it’s incumbent of me to have guests where nobody is going to look at my guest list and go “man I can’t believe you talked to that guy.” So I try to curate pretty hard who we have on the show…The best compliment I can give someone who is a money manager is if you took off their name and their identifiers, and you played them against who my other guests are, you’d go “wow I couldn’t tell who was the famous guest and who was the not-famous guest.”
What is the most interesting news story you’re following right now that you’re not covering?
I think the impeachment and all of the tentacles coming from it are clearly the most interesting news story. I both love and hate watching the news everyday.
If you weren’t in journalism, what would you be doing?
I’d consider broadcasting, which is another one of my side gigs, but that’s still journalism to some extent. I think I would either be a teacher or a coach, or probably both or something involved with that.
What do you read or watch every morning?
I have a news crawler — I use a subscription service to go out and find me all of the best mutual fund oriented stories and personal finance oriented stuff that’s out there, and I’ll take a look at that. Not every day, but like once a week. I’m at least looking at the headlines that have to do with mutual funds, whether they’re in the United States or being written about by some paper in Melbourne, Australia. It’s not an everyday thing for me. I love listening to the sports stuff, but I only really do that on certain days…I watch a lot of news, I watch a modicum of market talk it’s always on in the background. As a journalist I have to be aware of what’s happening moment by moment, but as a columnist and doing what I do, I don’t have to respond to it.
What is your most treasured possession?
If you told me my house was on fire and I could grab one thing, what would I grab? There are two things that I would likely put in that camp, although there could be others. The two both relate to my mother. One is a painting that was done of my mother when my mother was four. My parents were born in Germany and I’m first-generation American. Almost everything my parents had did not make it to this country…This painting of her by a man who wound up — his name is not visible, it’s covered over by the frame because to survive he openly became a Nazi propoganda artist. So my grandparents covered up his name, but they kept the painting. The painting was done of my mother when she was four, and I know the whole story behind it. When people come into my house and see the painting they think it’s of my youngest daughter, who is the spitting image of my mom…I would say [the painting] qualifies on every level — in terms of what you would want a prized possession to be — it’s completely irreplaceable, it is one of a kind…it hung over the sofa in my grandparents’ apartment, so it’s one of my earliest memories tied to my grandparents, tied to my mom, tied to my daughter, to their story, because you can’t explain that without then having to explain how my parents get here.
So it’s either that, or something that I’ve had for a very short time, that none of us knew existed until a few years ago. After my parents moved out of the house, my dad had years worth of files on things we had all done…when my Dad turned 85…he asked all of our spouses if it would be ok for his birthday gift we went, and they didn’t. And so while we’re doing this, he pulls out a file of stuff from my mom…My mom goes through it and she finds her New Years’ Resolution from 1940. They are signed and witnessed by my grandparents, they are written in English — my mother was born in Germany, she was fluent in German, French, Spanish and English was her fourth language…and we were all in stitches as she read this. But it was so my mother — my mom’s father, my grandfather had this thing about when you came to the table, he checked your fingernails. In the middle of this document of all that she was going to do, my mom wrote “I will not come to the table without clean fingernails.”
What is your most marked characteristic?
I think it’s something that you try to not let other people see, in terms of what it would be for me, which is…I have no problem acknowledging look at who I talk to every day — I know that I’m never the smartest guy in the room. I’m not going to succeed on the basis of how smart I am. I’m going to work harder, longer…and I think that if you take a look at everything that I’m involved in, and yea, it’s a lot of me being the meat grinder, I’m the one who has to get it done, I’m the one who has to be relied on because it comes through me.
My brother used to say, “Jaffe’s are plodders” — we’re slow. I don’t do anything necessarily quickly. But I will work you into the ground, and I will do whatever it takes to finish it and with whatever energy and zest I can bring to it. My optimistic nature — which comes from my father, and my work ethic, which comes from both of my parents and my brother as well.