Frank Bennack Jr. had some advice for Steve Swartz. It was 2000 and Swartz was the editor in chief of Smart Money magazine, which he founded eight years earlier after a career that had been on fast-forward at The Wall Street Journal. Swartz had joined that paper in 1984 and by the end of the decade was the page one editor, a young wunderkind among heavyweights like Norman Pearlstine and Paul Steiger. At Smart Money, he shook up the dinosaurs of the category, like Money and Kiplinger's. Now, Bennack told him, it was time to do something else.
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