Dan Dorfman, Market-Moving Financial Journalist, Dies At 80

Discussion in 'Wall St. News' started by JamesL, Jun 17, 2012.

  1. JamesL

    JamesL

    Dan Dorfman, a journalist whose stock reports were once so market-moving that U.S. exchanges imposed regulations to limit the resulting price swings, has died at the age of 80.

    His death was announced in today’s New York Times. He died yesterday at New York Hospital, according to the death notice, which didn't specify the cause.

    Dorfman began swaying share prices regularly at the Wall Street Journal, where he wrote the Heard on the Street column for six years. Stints with New York and Esquire magazines, the New York Daily News, USA Today and Cable News Network followed.

    His influence peaked in the 1990s, when he appeared daily on the CNBC cable network and earned at least $800,000 annually for his television and print reporting. He paved the way for TV pundits such as Jim Cramer, the former hedge-fund manager who hosts CNBC’s “Mad Money” program.

    “I always found him entertaining, but I always thought he was a negative force, not a positive one,” Cramer wrote in 2006 for TheStreet.com. Dorfman “became so pressed for stories that I believe he had to compromise his own standards.”

    Money magazine, where Dorfman worked as a columnist, fired him in January 1996 as the government examined his relationship with a stock promoter. He suffered a stroke later that year and lost his position at CNBC.

    Even though the network exonerated him and regulators never accused him of a securities-law violation, his career wasn’t the same afterward. He wrote for the New York Sun, a newspaper that closed in 2008, and also blogged for Huffington Post as recently as last year.

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  2. jem

    jem

    its appropriate that Cramer commented.
    Cramer is Dorfman on steroids.
     
  3. Tsing Tao

    Tsing Tao

    I thought that was the Monday Night Football guy who used to announce with Al and Frank.
     
  4. Dorfman did move the markets. The same type of idiot that followed him now follows Cramer.
     
  5. Dorfman had far more clout back in the day than Cramer does. Cramer might move a stock a few cents afterhours. Dorfman was a BSD.
     
  6. 50/50

    50/50

    If you don't live to 100 in this day and age you probably have been doing something very wrong for a very long time. probably a bunch of stuff