10/12/05

 Nigel Jaquiss, a former Wall Street crude oil trader, conquered journalism and won a Pulitzer Prize.

            After 11 years of crude oil trading, Jaquiss left for a number of reasons.

            “My parents both died suddenly in their 50s, which made me focus on what I really wanted to do; I knew that I loved reading and writing far more than trading,” Jaquiss said. “Finally when my first child was born, I put the two earlier factors together in my mind and decided to make a switch.”

He was awarded the Pulitzer for his investigative work on Neil Goldschmidt, the former governor of Oregon. His story was published in May 2004 in the Willamette Week newspaper in Portland, Ore.

He was an English major in college and did some creative writing, but had no journalism experience, he said.

            “I wrote a novel (never published) when I quit trading and applied to Columbia journalism school at the same time…and that was where I wrote my first news story,” Jaquiss said.

He moved on to journalism because of his curious nature. He said he enjoys reporting and the writing process.

            “Working at a weekly, I get the chance to delve deeply into a variety of subjects…the net for me is that I get paid to learn and to improve my writing,” he said.

            His first big story was about a basketball player, who was as badly behaved as he was talented, Jaquiss said. The key fact was that the player was playing with a GPA of less than 1.0. That captured the attention of the school board and they changed the minimum GPA requirement for Portland, Ore.’s 50,000 students to 2.0.

            “Writing a story that resulted in a sweeping policy change really clued me in to the power of journalism,” Jaquiss said.

He covered schools for a few years. He has done investigative work about power and money for the past four years, he said.

Power and money is what brought Jaquiss to the story he was assigned to do on the former governor of Oregon, Neil Goldschmidt, he said.

 “My editor assigned me to write a story about what he’d been up to recently and specifically to look into the activities of the powerful consulting firm he ran,”, Jaquiss said.

Goldschmidt was named chairman of the State Board of Higher Education in Oregon at that time, he said.

            Jaquiss spoke with people who were familiar with Goldschmidt’s business activities to get some information on what the former governor was up to. He discovered that Goldschmidt had affairs with other women. Then he spoke to state Sen.Vicki Walker, who heard a rumor about Goldschmidt and a 14-year-old girl; she also had a piece of paper that presented the name of a probable victim, Jaquiss said.

            The story was hard to investigate, he said.

“It was very challenging because Goldschmidt was so influential nobody wanted to talk, because the victim and her mother denied anything happened, and because we are a small paper with far fewer resources than other local media who were ahead of us on the story,” Jaquiss said.

The story about Goldschmidt took about two months of non-stop work, from the time Senator Walker gave him the document about the young victim, to the time it was published, he said.

Jaquiss said that the Goldschmidt story has changed his life.

“It has raised my own and I think other people’s expectations; it has proven again to me that the press is incredibly powerful. It has taught me to be willing to suspend disbelief and it has made me a lot busier,” Jaquiss said.