Spotlight

In the “intensely competitive world of financial blogging,” no one starts earlier, writes more, or publishes faster than Joe Weisenthal, said Binyamin Appelbaum in The New York Times Magazine. Weisenthal, 31, is the lead financial blogger for BusinessInsider.com, which covers finance and technology with blunt headlines and snarky analysis for 15 million monthly readers. He keeps a schedule that would lay most mortals low. He rises at 4 a.m. each weekday to monitor global financial markets, and during his 16-hour workday churns out an average of 15 posts, ranging from financial charts to long analytical pieces. He also manages nearly a dozen reporters and holds running conversations with his roughly 19,000 Twitter followers. “To me, this kind of journalism, it’s fun,” Weisenthal says. “It’s kind of like a game.”

BusinessInsider.com is basically a “much more honest, much funnier version of CNBC,” said Felix Salmon in Reuters.com, and Weisenthal’s colorful commentary—“sometimes fast, sometimes clever, sometimes stupid, sometimes profane”—makes the site indispensable for readers who care about markets. Part of Weisenthal’s genius is that he “writes short better than anybody else in the business.” That’s a gift all of us financial writers wish we had.