Alumni in the News

 

Stephanie Stern, MBA '92

 

Investigative journalism paved the way to a successful business and financial public relations and investor relations for Stephanie Stern.

Ms. Stern started her career as a reporter for a community newspaper in New York City, then negotiated a contract with United Press International in Newark to become the bureau’s first female reporter.  She next turned to television news reporting where her natural instinct for investigative reporting gained her recognition as a reporter who challenged the status quo. “In the 70s, television seemed to view Wall Street as simply ‘talking heads,’ while I saw the world more and more focused on the financial industry,” says Ms. Stern. She proposed a television segment on women in the industry and in 1976 produced a six-minute segment for WNBC-TV called "Women on Wall Street" at a time when women were still virtually invisible on the financial scene.

"Muriel Siebert, the first woman to own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, and one of the first to set up a discount brokerage, gave me a quick education on Wall Street," says Stern. "She was the pioneer on the television segment, but I included women vice presidents on the trading desks at Salomon Brothers and Merrill Lynch. When I arrived with a film crew, Billy Salomon walked out to shake my hand, a strong indication of how unusual it was to have a news feature film crew producing a story on Wall Street."

A few months later, the television station made Stern head of WNBC-TV’s investigative Find Bureau. Her first assignment: to find out and report on how New York City was spending a half billion dollar federal fund it had received in the mid 1970’s. The Community Development Block Grant was conferred on the city to shore up cornerstone buildings in still viable but vulnerable neighborhoods so that a ripple effect would ensue from the renovated structure and shore up the entire area.

These and other experiences in which she delved into the financial and political aspects of money management and Wall Street inspired Ms. Stern to enter the financial world herself.  She started her own company while simultaneously earning an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. Her business degree made a dramatic difference in landing new accounts such as Merrill Lynch and Seibert Financial Corp., both of which remain clients to this day. Ms. Stern received her MBA in 1992, and a year later, her husband, Dick Stern, who had been a senior editor at Forbes magazine for 13 years, decided to join her as co-founder of Stern & Co. Together they have built a thriving business, currently representing such prestigious names as Edward Jones, Jefferies & Co., CompuDyne, Downtown Los Angeles Business Improvement District, Sam Zell and many others.