Tom Waite, Alliance News Founder, Remembers Observer Roots
COURTESY OF TOM WAITE
Tom Waite, now the CEO and editor in chief of Alliance News, had his beginnings as a CLC Observer editor in the 1980s.
November 9, 2021
Thomas Waite, College at Lincoln Center (CLC) ’87, originally chose Fordham’s midtown campus because he wanted to go to the law school. Forty years later, he’s running a business news organization in London — he never applied to law school.
Since leaving CLC, Waite has gone on to accumulate 30 years of experience working for The New York Times, Dow Jones and Alliance News, the last of which is a business news outlet he founded in 2013. At Alliance News, Waite serves as chief executive and editor for the London headquarters. Alliance News covers markets and companies in the U.K., South Africa and Milan.
During the 1984-85 academic year, Waite worked for The Observer as an editorial page editor. He got his start at the newspaper by writing op-eds on politics because he was studying political science still with the intention to go into law.
He also wrote stories on subjects ranging from a fake exposé of Ram Van drivers, to coverage of a demonstration for divestment from South Africa’s apartheid regime to voting in the 1984 presidential election.
But the following semester, Waite became more interested in the news section, becoming a news editor for the 1985-86 academic year.
“We tried to cover both the university at large, and we tried, in particular, to cover CLC.” Thomas Waite, CLC ’87
“We tried to cover both the university at large, and we tried, in particular, to cover CLC. And when I was there, we also were trying to start to cover the … Lincoln Center area,” he said.
Today, the news section at The Observer continues to cover both university and city news that applies to the Fordham community.
Waite’s foray into reporting on the area around Fordham was, unbeknownst to him, the beginning of what he would do for his long career in business journalism. His specific interest in real estate news came from the significant development that the Lincoln Center neighborhood underwent in the 1980s.
“In fact, there was a building built literally across the road from CLC, which I believe is still there. It’s a very, very tall, residential building. At the time, it stuck out like a sore thumb,” Waite described.
The building is South Park Tower, located behind St. Paul’s and right across from the Lowenstein Center and McMahon Hall. Although it hasn’t gotten any uglier, it no longer sticks out among the many high-rises in the neighborhood.
“I ended up getting into business journalism because I started doing real estate reporting for The Observer.” Thomas Waite
Waite’s article on the South Park Tower and other local real estate for The Observer inspired him to freelance for the Westside Spirit, a free local weekday newspaper.
“Actually, that’s how I ended up getting into business journalism because I started doing real estate reporting for The Observer,” he said.
As strange as it might seem to Lincoln Center students today, Waite’s home neighborhood was Fordham’s Bronx campus. Any residential Lincoln Center student lived at Rose Hill.
The Fordham Lincoln Center that Waite experienced is very different from the Lincoln Center of today. There was no residential dorm on campus (McMahon Hall would be opened in 1993, and McKeon Hall was opened in 2014), Ram Van service had been operating for less than a decade, and The Observer’s issues were printed at the Rose Hill campus.
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The layout of the newspaper — currently created on Adobe InDesign over a matter of days — was crafted with “X-Acto knives and the wax machine,” laying the articles down on a long table in a windowless room of Lowenstein, “trying to get it right, and then lifting them up and putting them down again.”
Waite said he wasn’t involved in the printing process, but production nights went so late at Lincoln Center that he and his fellow Rose Hill residents had to take the D train home. “But it was always worth it,” he said.
Because of those late nights spent writing articles and laying out the paper, Waite discovered his love for journalism.
“I would not have gotten into journalism before the CLC Observer, without a doubt. I would have made a lot more money as a lawyer, but I might not have been as happy.” Thomas Waite
“I would not have gotten into journalism before the CLC Observer, without a doubt. I would have made a lot more money as a lawyer, but I might not have been as happy,” he remarked.
The Observer’s small size meant that he and the other dozen or so editors had to do everything themselves, from interviews to op-eds to edits. Students could write anything, “as long as it wasn’t too wacky,” he said.
Today, students still have the opportunity to write whatever they pitch, but with a few more restrictions and oversight than at The Observer’s founding.
Waite recommended that anyone involved with The Observer “should try to take advantage of the fact that (they) can try different things with it because it is such a small organization.” He also said that since journalism isn’t as traditional as it used to be, it’s vital that anyone wishing to enter the field should find their own niche.
Although his path was nothing like he imagined when he began at Fordham, his experiences with real estate and business journalism at The Observer led to the rest of his career.
