Good journalists obsess over their ledes, the geeky term we use to describe the opening of a story. Without a compelling lede we risk losing readers before we’ve even started telling our tale. (I hope I haven’t lost you already.) Nobody knew the importance of a great lede or was more skilled at crafting one than longtime Institutional Investor editor Peter Landau, who passed away late last month at 80 following a long bout with cancer.
Landau joined II as a senior editor in the summer of 1968. His first story, “The Mystique of the Hedge Funds,” was a probing look at what was then a truly secretive industry, numbering some 100 funds managing a combined $2 billion in assets for “well-heeled” investors. In 1971, II founder and editor-in-chief Gilbert Kaplan made Landau editor of the entire magazine — a position he would hold for two decades.
Landau and Kaplan were the perfect pair. Kaplan, a former economist at the American Stock Exchange who had launched II in 1967 at the age of 26, was full of ideas for dramatic stories about the emerging world of professional money management. Landau, who had spent ten years at Newsweek before joining II, would execute them. “Kaplan came into my office with a list of 72 story ideas he had when he started the magazine,” Landau told me two years ago over lunch. “We worked our way through the list.”
It was Landau who translated Kaplan’s idea for a story about the best analysts on Wall Street into the All-America Research Team, which this year celebrated its 42nd anniversary. We now survey money managers around the globe to identify the top sell-side analysts in markets from Brazil to India.
As a journalist, Landau was the ultimate craftsman. He pored over copy, pencil (and often pipe) in hand, convinced that he could make any story better — and he could. The Duke University graduate and avid golfer was a deft storyteller and displayed an uncanny skill for putting complex subjects into simple English. His uncompromising focus on quality was infectious. “Peter was the lifeblood of the magazine,” says Kaplan. “He always brought a high literary quality to our hard-hitting stories.”
Self-effacing yet funny, Landau didn’t seek personal accolades. But under his stewardship II received many professional ones, winning 40 major journalism prizes, including a National Magazine Award for a 1983 cover story, written by Chris Welles, on the Drysdale Government Securities bond-trading scandal.
Landau had an enormous impact on the careers of scores of journalists, mine included. In 1987 he hired me as a copy editor, although I lacked any journalism experience and had the temerity to say, when asked during my interview where I saw my career going, that I wanted his job. (It’s a testament to his civility that Landau didn’t break out in laughter.)
As an editor, Landau’s greatest strength was his enormous respect for the reader — an ethos that continues at II to this very day.
