Some little kids want to be pro athletes, some want to be rock stars or scientists. Andrew Ross Sorkin wanted to be Brandon Tartikoff, the head of NBC’s entertainment division. As a fifth grader in suburban New York, he says, “I built a diorama in a shoebox. There was a wall of TVs and little index cards for how you’d be scheduling prime time, and I was sitting in the chair. Precocious is not an unfair word.”
In high school, the journalist/budding media mogul created a magazine, Sports Page. “It was originally just for my own high school, but then we started trying to distribute it in high schools regionally, and then nationally. I liked sports, but it wasn’t because I wanted to write about Michael Jordan. I wanted to sell ads.” Sorkin believed national advertisers would jump at the chance to reach teenage boys at school.
The experience taught Sorkin valuable lessons about media and business, and was the entrée to his future career. Sorkin studied the New York Times advertising columns of Stuart Elliott and managed to line up a weekend lunch with the columnist. “He took me on a tour of the [Times] building. And then, I got kind of snuck in as a sort of pseudo intern for five weeks in the summer of 1995…. I was there to staple and get coffee.”
An editor who overheard Sorkin talking about “this thing called the internet” gave him his first assignment. Sorkin’s story on the subject was published, and he was asked to stay on for the rest of the summer. It was the start of a 30-year relationship.
After graduating from Cornell, Sorkin joined the Times full-time. Based in London, he covered mergers and acquisitions, and periodically appeared on BBC, Sky, and Bloomberg TV. He returned to New York in 2000 as the Times’s chief M&A reporter, and he founded the paper’s DealBook news site in 2001.
Sorkin’s TV presence grew, first as a guest on CNBC’s “Kudlow and Cramer.” As he covered the white-collar crimes of the early 2000s, he was a repeat guest on the “Today Show” and “Charlie Rose.” Within a few years he was a regular contributor to CNBC. In 2011, became co-anchor of the network’s “Squawk Box” while continuing his New York Times responsibilities.
On “Squawk Box,” Sorkin aims to deliver “interviews of consequence. Most people are joining us because something great has happened or something awful. It’s very interesting to be able to mine that.” As a news anchor, he says he works to create trust with the audience.
His sense of story is impeccable. “Too Big to Fail,” Sorkin’s best-selling chronicle of the 2008 financial crisis, became an Emmy-nominated HBO movie. He also co-created the Showtime drama series, “Billions.” “I’m fascinated by fascinating people – what motivates them to do what they do. And I love a great tale,” Sorkin says. “I love a story that is going to impact us all in some way.”
