The Texas Lawbook has hired longtime business journalist and editor Jeff Schnick as its new editor.
Schnick, 45, is the former editor-in-chief of the Dallas Business Journal and a former assistant business editor at The Dallas Morning News. He will oversee a news team of nine reporters who cover business litigation and trials, corporate mergers, acquisitions and capital markets, law firm management and business bankruptcies.
Schnick already has a running start. He worked with Texas Lawbook reporters when he was an editor at The News and the DBJ. He officially joined The Lawbook team earlier this year working on specific projects, including improving our graphics and data presentation, upgrading The Lawbook’s exclusive Corporate Deal Tracker database, expanding our premium subscriber content and improving internal communications within The Lawbook team.
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“We’re working persistently to make our news product more comprehensive across all our coverage areas, as well as to ensure that our premium subscribers are offered more exclusive data and stories,” Schnick said. “The Lawbook is known for its deep-dive profiles and its enterprise journalism that springs from our ethos of breaking meaningful news on the latest deals, restructurings, cases and their verdicts, as well as partner promotions and lateral moves. We want to enhance those areas, but if it’s not broke, we won’t fix it. We won’t tinker for the sake of it.”
“Everything is based on the feedback our subscribers are giving us about what they like, what they want more of, and what they wish we’d do better in the future,” he said.
Texas Lawbook publisher Brooks Igo describes Schnick as “the quintessential newsman.”
“Having grown up in the business at papers across the country, Jeff knows how to run a newsroom and he has acquired skills that make him a ‘five-tool’ contributor,” Igo said. “We are already earning dividends from his management savvy and storytelling chops. Anytime you can add someone with his experience leading business coverage in this market, you’re going to level up.”
“Plus, Jeff’s passion for journalism is infectious and he truly cares about people,” he said.
The Lawbook is an employee-owned publication that will celebrate its 13th anniversary in November and is now the largest online daily legal newspaper in Texas with nearly 16,000 paid subscribers, including more than 2,800 corporate in-house counsel.
In the Q&A below, Schnick discusses his background, his passion for newspapers and his plans for enhancing Texas Lawbook content.
Texas Lawbook: Tell us a little about your childhood.
Jeff Schnick: Growing up in Northern Indiana, just 35 miles from Lake Michigan, was a unique experience that blended the tranquility of the countryside with the occasional adventure to the lakeshore. Summers were particularly special, as winters there were especially brutal. So, if there was ever a chance to do so in the summer, I would occasionally ride my bike up to the lake.
The journey was a bit of an expedition, filled with the promise of the cool water and sandy beaches ahead. Armed with my trusty Walkman, I would listen to Jim Bohannon’s America in the Morning AM radio news show, which made the miles fly by, especially if dawn was halted temporarily by clouds.
At the time, Bohannon was also getting ready to take over Larry King’s late-night time slot on Mutual, so he clearly kept stranger hours than me. I’d get a dose of news: politics, sports and business, plus the ag report. What’s knee high by the Fourth of July? If you know, you know.
My internal clock and the natural rhythm of the environment guided my adventures on the occasions when the radio’s batteries weren’t as durable as advertised.
The ride itself was a serene experience, taking me along backcountry roads where I rarely saw any meaningful traffic.
If I timed my departure right, I could make it to Red Arrow Highway around lunchtime. I’d grab myself a snack from a hamburger stand, a small reward for the effort of the trip. It clearly added a touch of nostalgia to the rides, as that has stuck with me all these years later: a blend of solitude, an occasional dirt road, small-town charm and the simple joy of exploration.
In the winter, I spent most of my time inside when I wasn’t shoveling lake-effect snow, and we didn’t have cable TV or a Fox affiliate, so I missed out on the early years of The Simpsons and Married With Children. Newspapers were cheap and always available (as peculiar as that seems today), so for less than a dollar a day, you’d get the world with the Chicago Tribune (the Sun-Times, if it wasn’t sold out) and USA Today, plus we had a subscription to the local daily. Any time we’d run to the store or to get gas, I’d snag a handful of papers, and that was my entertainment. There are only so many times you can watch MST3K or Gunsmoke reruns.
Back then, newspapers truly served the middle class with a steady diet of actual news of interest to their communities. My immediate and extended family was no different from any others: union truckers, railroad workers, nurses, defense contractors — they all subscribed to at least one newspaper. I don’t remember a time in my life when there wasn’t a newspaper sitting around at any given time.
Lawbook: When did the idea of being a journalist and editor first come to mind?
Schnick: My parents were very supportive and nurtured my preference for reading. My mom wanted me to become a prosecutor because she said I was particularly good at arguing. I wasn’t adept at making an argument, mind you, just plain arguing!
As a teenager, I worked a part-time production job at the local daily in what was then called the platemaking department. It was our job to shoot the Velox paper that married the news copy and advertisements on one board on this giant camera, which made a negative and then take that negative of the full page and create a metal plate that would go on the printing press. I learned a lot about the production process, but I’d notice errors once in a while in the news copy and I’d point them out to the newsroom. I never bothered them with punctuation issues: I’m talking about misspelled names of people or places. The wrong caption on a photo. A headline that didn’t make sense.
Most of the editors appreciated the extra set of eyes; a few didn’t. I was paid whether or not the page was error-free, so for the folks who didn’t, I let them be. Their jobs were hard enough without some dipshit teenager reminding them they misidentified Lake Maxinkuckee on a locator map.
As is the case with any job where you take an interest, veterans show you the ropes. I was lucky enough to be tutored by an actual veteran, not just of the industry. One of my favorite colleagues was a World War II Navy man, Dick Bothwell. He explained that the newspaper business was notoriously cheap and built to break your heart, but that there’s nothing else like it if you can overcome that. And newspapers served a purpose: to make their communities stronger.
There were others, too many to count: my boss Gary Lippincott, who oversaw platemaking and was probably the nicest guy I’ve ever met; columnist Bill Moor (who taught us youngsters at the time — including Houston journo-turned-in-house guru Tom Gutting — how to be actual journalists); Gregg Bender, the patient and gifted graphics editor who tolerated my nagging questions while he labored on deadline with the front page.
Dick died more than two decades ago, and Gary a couple of years back, sadly. Having the support of colleagues like them helped show me that I could turn this into a career, and it all started there, in the back room, developing negatives for the South Bend Tribune.
Without that experience, I never could have met the journalists who changed the course of my career: Michael Apuan, who oversees the print edition at The Dallas Morning News; Dennis Fulton, the former business editor for the DMN; Tracy Merzi, the publisher who took a chance on me at the Dallas Business Journal. I’m not sure how they managed to deal with me, but I learned so much, and those life lessons there and at many other stops along the way set the stage for my role at The Lawbook.
Lawbook: You have been an editor at The Dallas Morning News and the Dallas Business Journal. Tell us a little about your career and the jobs you have done.
Schnick: I’ve been fortunate to have almost every job at a newspaper at one point or another: writer, planning editor, desk editor, graphics and production and senior leadership. My first exposure to Texas was as an editor in Abilene, but over the last 20 years or so, most of my experience is on the business news side.
At the DMN, I served in various night editing roles. The bulk of my career was spent working with the business news department, handling late-breaking news, coordinating the production of the print section and monitoring the wire services. At the DBJ, I was managing editor for a year, and then the editor-in-chief job came open. I often joke that there were two applicants for that job: nobody and me, and nobody withdrew his name.
I believe I was the right person for the job at the time, though I’d never led my own newsroom before that. Tracy took a chance on me when she probably could have held out for a more seasoned journalist. She saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself. And she aggressively pushed us to be a sophisticated publication by stripping away all of the noise, which allowed our newsroom to focus on the content and our subscribers. You won’t find a better mentor or newsroom advocate than Tracy.
Oddly enough, I’ve never been laid off in an industry known for doing that on a fairly regular basis, and some of my early career moves were designed to avoid that eventuality. I’ve been extremely fortunate to work for stable publications throughout my career, which is rare. Thousands of journalists far more talented than me haven’t been nearly as blessed in that regard.
Lawbook: Why join The Texas Lawbook?
Schnick: I’ve always loved lawyers as sources. They leak the best documents, usually because they created them. They’re also whipsmart. At a daily paper, when you really need to drill down on a complex topic, you rely on your legal sources to help explain how and why it matters to readers.
Naturally, my relationship with you and Brooks Igo played a significant role in my decision to join the team. I’ve watched The Lawbook flourish since it was founded, and in my time at the DMN and the DBJ, we had content-sharing agreements that helped bolster my understanding of The Lawbook’s news product.
With a mix of experienced journalists and led by one of the top young business executives in the country and a veteran newsman as its founder, the opportunity at The Lawbook to help craft statewide coverage for a business legal audience was too good to pass up.
It’s the best of both worlds: Texas business and lawyers. And covering the entire state instead of only DFW is a huge draw for me, because I’ve never had that prospect.
Lawbook: What has been your focus during the first few months or so on the job?
Schnick: I want to meet as many sources as I can to learn about their firms and specialty advisory practices. I’m figuring out what that looks like for the rest of the year, because I want to travel frequently to Houston, as well as Austin and San Antonio, for as many coffees or lunches as our sources will tolerate.
Internally, I’m learning our processes and workflow, and have spent a good deal of time with our Corporate Deal Tracker team, learning our database procedures.
We’re also working on some minor endeavors related to our newsletters and website that should improve the user experience for our subscribers.
Lawbook: What is the biggest obstacle or challenge for The Lawbook?
Schnick: Complacency. And I’d say that for any news organization, not just The Lawbook.
Our audience’s needs shift quickly, and we have to be able to adapt to them. We need to anticipate what they want before they ask for it, and if we don’t, someone else will.
What keeps me up at night as an executive is the idea of being effective at self-disruption. We’re a daily digital newspaper. Our product needs to be better than the one we put out yesterday.
Because we’re an employee-owned publication, we can alter course quickly when our subscribers require more from us.
Lawbook: Everyone knows that I sleep late and do not want any calls before 10 a.m. but that I work late into the evening. How and when do you like to be contacted for story pitches?
Schnick: My workday runs from about 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., give or take.
For non-breaking stories, email makes the most sense, because it gives me an opportunity to read the pitch. But I don’t mind anyone texting or calling me. If it’s an exclusive, text or call me, for sure. I don’t have a preference in terms of when you send me something.
Just don’t be surprised when you text at 2:45 a.m. if I text you back and ask for more details. Also, don’t worry about “bugging“ me. Texas is a big state, and a lot is going on, even on “slow“ days. If you need an immediate answer, press me. It’s not an issue.
Lawbook: What are one or two things that Texas Lawbook readers need to know about you?
Schnick: People are always surprised that I know how to work on cars: pull transmissions, rebuild engines and such. I suck at body work and painting, though. My preference is toying around with 1960s or 1970s Mopars, but living in Dallas makes that difficult because you need more garage space. My latest project, though not as exciting as a 1971 Charger Super Bee with a four-barrel 383, is a 2004 Toyota Rav4. Don’t ask. Seriously. I’m questioning my sanity with this one, but thankfully, The Lawbook gives me plenty of excuses for not getting it done. At least the parts are cheaper.
I also like the beach, preferably those in Florida or the Caribbean. I have a soft spot for the Coastal Bend. Texas beaches don’t always get the respect they deserve. There are a lot of gorgeous natural areas on the coast near Port Aransas.
Texas has something for everyone, including unbearable summers.
Connect with Jeff on LinkedIn or email him at jeff.schnick@texaslawbook.net.