Myron Kandel
Following a distinguished career in journalism, Myron Kandel was named to head the newly-formed Initiative for Corporate Responsibility and Investor Protection in December 2005. The Initiative, funded in part by a settlement reached with Tyco International by the New Hampshire Secretary of State’s Securities Division, is holding a series of high-profile public forums on those issues featuring leaders in government, business, the law, academe and the media from around the nation. The Initiative aims to make those subjects part of the Presidential campaign agenda for the first time in U.S. history.
Myron Kandel was the founding financial editor and economic commentator for CNN for 25 years until his retirement from those posts in 2005 . After a previous career in newspapers, he was part of CNN’s original launch team in 1980 and has been recognized as a pioneer in the development of financial news on television. In 2000, TJFR, a media industry publication, named him one of the ten most influential business journalists of the 20th century.
He started his career in journalism as a copy boy at The New York Times in 1951, working nights while completing his senior year at Brooklyn College and then while earning a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Upon graduation from Columbia, he was promoted to copy editor at The Times and later became a financial reporter.
Kandel next became business editor of The Washington Star and then a foreign correspondent for The New York Herald Tribune, based in Bonn and covering Germany and the European Common Market. He returned to the U.S. in 1964 to become the Trib's financial editor, holding that post until the paper folded in 1966. He then became editor and president of the New York Law Journal, the nation's largest daily legal newspaper, and subsequently founded and published several newsletters, including The Wall Street Letter, The Corporate Shareholder and Review of the Financial Press.
From 1976 to 1982, Kandel co-authored the "Greer/Kandel Report," a syndicated financial column that appeared in leading newspapers around the country. He was also financial editor of the New York Post from 1977 to 1979, before leaving to help launch CNN.
He is the author of How to Cash in on the Coming Stock Market Boom: The Smart Investor's Guide to Making Money. The book, published in January 1982, accurately forecast the biggest bull market in Wall Street history, which began that August and continued until 2000. Among his many honors, Kandel has received a Peabody Award for CNN's coverage of the 1987 stock market crash and a magazine award from the University of Missouri School of Journalism. He has taught journalism at the City College of New York and Columbia University and lectures frequently in the U.S. and abroad. During Army duty in 1954-56, he served as Washington correspondent for Armed Forces Press Service and Pacific Stars & Stripes.
Kandel has been the president of five journalism groups, including the New York Financial Writers’ Association; the Columbia Journalism Alumni Association; the Deadline Club chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists, and the Society of Silurians, a group of veteran New York journalists. He also served twice, 20 years apart, as president of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.
He has received a number of career achievement awards, most recently in June 2006, from the Loeb Foundation, which presented him with its Lifetime Achievement Award, given to an individual whose body of work in business, financial and economic news exemplifies journalistic excellence. In 2005, he was named to the Financial Journalism Hall of Fame by the New York Financial Writers’ Association, only the seventh person so honored in the group’s 78-year history.
Kandel has also received three honorary doctorate degrees — from Washington & Jefferson College in Pennsylvania; Bethany College in West Virginia, and Franklin Pierce College in New Hampshire, as well as a Presidential Medal from Brooklyn College.
He lives in New York with his wife Thelma, an artist and author. They have two children and four grandchildren.