Financial Web site hires new leader

Business journalist and author Richard Jenkins started his career in print newspapers more than three decades ago, long enough to make him one of the industry's dinosaurs.

But Jenkins realized the industry's business model — and daily newspaper's monopolistic hold on news delivery — was ripe for change long before most of his peers. He took that philosophy to MSN Money in 1996, when the business-news Web site run by Microsoft was in its infancy.

Now Jenkins will bring his business journalism philosophies to Sarasota as the new president of MoneyShow.com, an online financial news portal popular with both professional money managers and individual investors. The site is run by MoneyShow, a Sarasota-based financial media company that puts on investor conferences worldwide.

“The best minds in the financial industry are part of MoneyShow,” Jenkins tells Coffee Talk. “That scope is pretty rare.”

Jenkins worked for several newspapers in Southern California in the 1980s, including the Los Angeles Times, before going to work for MSN Money. He also published a book on supercomputers.

Jenkins will be in charge of content development, partnerships, sales and marketing at MoneyShow.com. Jenkins, who has spoken at several MoneyShow events, says the Web site already does a lot right in terms of providing news to readers in the right format.

“More and more people are looking to get their news straight from the source,” says Jenkins, “as opposed to getting it through a journalist.”