CANR
WORK TITLE: Fifteen Cents on the Dollar
WORK NOTES:
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WEBSITE: https://louisestory.com/
CITY: New York
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COUNTRY: United States
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LAST VOLUME:
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A. (American studies), 2003; Yale School of Management, M.B.A., 2006; Columbia University, master’s degree (journalism).
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, editor, consultant, filmmaker, and educator. New York Times, investigative reporter and multimedia strategist, ca. 2005-15; Wall Street Journal, chief news strategist and chief product and technology officer, ca. 2018-21; Yale University, New Haven, CT, instructor; Louise Story Strategies, principal and media consultant. Executive producer and writer of the documentary film The Kleptocrats, BBC, 2018.
AVOCATIONS:Biking, running marathons, rock climbing.
AWARDS:Gerald Loeb Award finalist, three times; Game Changers for 2010 citation, Huffington Post; Silver Barlett & Steele Award, 2012.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Boston Globe, Hartford Courant, Medium, New York Times, Orlando Sentinel, and Wall Street Journal.
SIDELIGHTS
[open time]An accomplished journalist, Story has held high-level positions at the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, specializing in news strategy and digital-age innovations. She coauthored a book connected to her acquired expertise in finance and bureaucracy, titled Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap. Working at the New York Times for over a decade, until the mid-2010s, Story early on covered such topics as motherhood plans among Ivy Leaguers and the nuances of the 2008 financial crisis. Her series on the advantages enjoyed by major bankers led to a Securities and Exchange Commission case against Goldman Sachs and a nearly two-billion-dollar judgment against banks trading in derivatives. At the Times she ended up in charge of projects including live radio segments, live video programming, and interactive journalism. She was also involved in projects concerning innovation strategies and target audiences. Meanwhile she assembled major stories on local subsidies, high-end real estate, international shell companies, and corruption among Chinese and Malaysian elites. In the later 2010s Story proceeded to a preeminent post at the Wall Street Journal. As one of the paper’s top five editors, Story was tasked with overseeing news strategy and corporate adaptation for the digital age. She was also at the helm of design and product engineering and management. In her independent consulting work, Story advises leaders in the media industry on issues ranging from content and products to business strategy and artificial intelligence.
Story teamed up with Ebony Reed, with whom she worked at the Wall Street Journal in the summer of 2020, to write Fifteen Cents on the Dollar. Focusing on the experiences of Black millennials in the Atlanta area, Story and Reed set about trying to quantify the acknowledged wealth gap between Black and white Americans. Groundwork for this gap was first laid by slavery, the profound imbalances of which were further entrenched when abolition only led to sharecropping and the tilted playing field of segregation. Southern states are known to have deliberately encoded bias against Black Americans, but the federal government often played a counterproductive role as well. The housing assistance offered by the G.I. Bill fell short of equality in permitting prejudice at the transactional level. Through the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, established in the 1930s by the New Deal, neighborhoods were color-coded, with “redlined” districts considered too risky to be insured by government mortgages. Virtually all neighborhoods where African Americans lived were redlined. Story and Reed identify echoes as well as continuations of biased policies in the present day, including in banking, lending, and housing. Civic leaders in Atlanta hoped to remedy the situation by founding a homegrown Black bank, but major proportions of revenue ended up flowing to white investors and outsiders anyway.
A Kirkus Reviews writer reckoned that the gap framed in the title of Fifteen Cents on the Dollar is not hyperbolic but an accurate assessment of racial wealth imbalances. Praising Story and Reed’s “eye-opening look at how the wealth gap between Black Americans and the white majority grows ever wider,” the reviewer deemed their text an “important book that should inform conversations about equity at every level.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2024, review of Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap.
ONLINE
Louise Story website, https://louisestory.com (July 24, 2024).
Talking Biz News, https://talkingbiznews.com/ (July 27, 2021), Chris Roush, “Story, Chief News Strategist, Is Departing from Wall Street Journal.”
Yale Insights, https://insights.som.yale.edu/ (February 23, 2022), Ted O’Callahan, “The Past and Present of Race, Money, and Equity in America,” interview with Story and Ebony Reed.
Louise Story is a media leader with a track record of helping news companies grow and a journalist with a passion for great storytelling and incisive reporting that impacts the world. She is an expert on the future of the news business (which she teaches and consults on), race and money in America (the topic of her book) as well as international corruption and the 2008 financial crisis (two topics she covered as a reporter).
Louise has worn many hats in the media — masthead editor, technologist, filmmaker, manager of large reporting and video projects, media and audience strategist, investigative reporter, radio production, design thinker, product leader, head of innovation projects, builder of large teams and senior editor with responsibility for a large daily news report. She takes on projects that she feels will move the needle in helping the world have more journalism that matters. This podcast describes Louise’s impact-oriented approach to life and career.
Louise recently completed co-writing a book on the Black-white wealth gap. The book is called “Fifteen Cents on the Dollar: How Americans Made the Black-White Wealth Gap” and is being published by HarperCollins. (To learn more, please visit her book site here.) And she is teaching at Yale University. (Information on her Yale course here.) She also takes on select consulting work for media company leaders focused on content, product, technology and AI strategy and best practices.
The feature-length film Louise wrote and executive produced in 2018 — “The Kleptocrats” — debuted at NYC Doc Fest, aired on the BBC and toured to festivals in Australia, Europe and elsewhere. It was sold to Sony and Starz and can now be streamed on Apple and Amazon. The film grew out of one of Louise’s investigations, which led to a grand jury investigation, a $3.9 billion fine levied on Goldman Sachs, the criminal conviction of Malaysia’s prime minister and other impact around the world.
Louise most recently was the Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer at The Wall Street Journal. That job included scope across the full WSJ with a significant operational and strategic mandate. In the newsroom, Louise was one of the top five news editors and she oversaw the news strategy as well as its digital transformation. For the full WSJ (content and commercial), Louise oversaw the product engineering, design and product management teams. As the WSJ’s editor in chief wrote upon Louise’s departure, Louise “played a central role in advancing our digital transformation and broadening the reach and impact of our journalism. She has brought in new skills, capabilities and ways of thinking that have elevated our journalism and greatly improved our product, technology and data experiences for our members. Her work has helped guide our coverage and accelerate our growth in audiences and subscribers over the past three years.”
Prior to this role, Louise spent more than a decade at The New York Times. During that span, she helped lead multimedia and strategy initiatives and worked on ground-breaking projects as an investigative reporter that led to multiple billion-dollar plus financial settlements, government reforms and legal convictions.
Among her strategic role at The Times, she served as executive producer of the Times’ live interactive journalism managing a team that worked with more than 300 reporters to create and program original live video from the field and in studio. In 2015, she worked on a committee studying the Audience of the Times. In 2013-2014, she was a member of the Innovation Committee, which authored the Innovation Report. In 2012, she hosted and helped The Times create a live video news program for its web site. From 2009 until 2012, she produced live radio segments about business topics for “The Takeaway,” a national radio program that was partnered with The Times.
While at The Times, Louise’s investigative reporting work spurred major reforms and law enforcement cases.
From 2014-2015, she worked on a project about the rising use of shell companies to purchase high-end real estate. That project, which traced shell companies to places as far and wide as Malaysia, Russia, Mexico and China, can be read here. Louise was honored by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and her work resulted in: a federal program to track high-end real estate buyers, changes in New York City real estate regulations, a federal complaint in the U.S. against family members of a Chinese politician and a record setting Department of Justice kleptocracy case involving friends and family of Malaysia’s prime minister, who was found guilty of many charges of fraud as well as a $3.9 billion settlement with Goldman Sachs.
In 2012, she worked on a project about state and local business subsidies that was awarded the Silver Barlett & Steele award and helped lead to major reforms in financial reporting standards for local governments, requiring them to publicly disclose subsidies for the first time.
From 2008-2012, Louise wrote about Wall Street and finance and was one of the lead reporters in chronicling the financial crisis of 2008. Her articles about Wall Street also spurred change. One series on the advantages bankers enjoy over other investors and customers led to a major SEC case against Goldman Sachs and also to a $1.87 billion settlement paid by banks in the derivatives industry. Another series was on the lack of prosecutions related to the financial crisis.
While covering Wall Street, Louise contributed to a project that was a finalist for the 2010 Emmy Awards and to one that was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Public Service. She was also a finalist three times for the Gerald Loeb Award and was named one of the Huffington Post’s Game Changers for 2010.
Prior to covering Wall Street, Louise wrote about advertising and marketing for the Times. In 2005, she spent several months studying the motherhood plans of Ivy League female students and wrote an article on that topic that became the most e-mailed story of that year.
She has also written hundreds of articles for other news outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Boston Globe, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.
Louise earned a master’s degree in journalism at Columbia University and an M.B.A. as well as a B.A. in American Studies at Yale University. She lives in New York City. In her free time, she bikes, runs marathons and is a rock climber. She occasionally posts about on Medium.
Story, Louise FIFTEEN CENTS ON THE DOLLAR Harper/HarperCollins (NonFiction None) $32.00 6, 18 ISBN: 9780063234727
An eye-opening look at how the wealth gap between Black Americans and the white majority grows ever wider.
Reporting largely from the Atlanta area, veteran investigative journalists Story and Reed focus closely, but not solely, on Black millennials and the challenges they face in building wealth. The impediments to their success are many, and most have been deeply entrenched for decades. The Black-white wealth gap began, of course, with enslavement and the unpaid labor it entailed, but it persisted long after. As the authors show, the benefits of the New Deal did not often extend into Black communities, and the service of millions of Black men and women in the military did not translate into the equal application of the GI Bill, one great flaw of which "was that the VA offered housing assistance but made no requirements that players in the housing market treat Black buyers equally." In Atlanta, an epicenter of Black American culture and commerce, the banking and housing systems are still biased against Black borrowers and mortgage holders. Ironically, the authors write, one purported remedy was the formation, thanks to Andrew Young and other civic leaders, of a homegrown Black bank; the irony comes with their steady discovery of how much of the money flows into white hands and how many of the principals within the bank are outsiders. Efforts to buy locally and from Black producers ended with one activist's discovering that "there was nothing in his fridge he could eat, no vehicles he could drive, and not even weed he could smoke." In the end, by the authors' calculus, the 15 cents of the title isn't hyperbolic: A gap already known to be vast takes on the contours of the Grand Canyon.
An important book that should inform conversations about equity at every level.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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Source Citation
MLA 9th Edition APA 7th Edition Chicago 17th Edition Harvard
"Story, Louise: FIFTEEN CENTS ON THE DOLLAR." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673976/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=2bbc81ed. Accessed 26 June 2024.