Monday and Friday

🎙️ 📰 Reflecting on two transitions this week and the positive impact of good journalists.

Sep 27, 2025

The news has been a part of my life since I was a little kid.

I remember watching the ABC evening news with Petter Jennings in the family room while my mom made dinner in the kitchen when I was in elementary school.

I started reading my dad’s Wall Street Journals not too long after. The WSJ had a funny story on the front page every day (a feature known as the A-Hed I would learn years later) that — in retrospect — was a great gateway for this young reader. By the time I was in college, I was a regular WSJ subscriber.

When I started commuting via car for work, NPR’s All Things Considered became my go-to evening drive time companion for many years.

I mention all of this as context for two things that happened this week. We’ll start with yesterday.

Friday

black microphone on black microphone stand — Photo by Jacob Hodgson on Unsplash

NPR logo (source)

Ari Shapiro

Last night, Ari Shapiro signed off All Things Considered for the last time. His voice has been a familiar one on All Things Considered for the last decade and across NPR for more than 25 years. If you missed it, here is a link to a touching 8-minute audio retrospective with his co-hosts and people he has interviewed through the years:

Listen

‘All Things Considered’ bids farewell to host Ari Shapiro (NPR)

Here are a few quotes that resonated as I listened to it — behaviors we can learn from and embrace:

Finding

“And he always had a knack - no matter what the beat was, no matter what the assignment was - for finding people who might not always have had an easy way to speak truth to power.”

-Scott Detrow speaking about Ari Shapiro, 9/26/2025 (source)

Whole self

“That laugh - Ari has always championed bringing your whole self to the air. You hear that in just about every interview he does.”

-Mary Louise Kelly speaking about Ari Shapiro, 9/26/2025 (source)

Connecting

“What mattered most to Ari was the connection. He connected powerfully with listeners and with guests.”

-Scott Detrow speaking about Ari Shapiro, 9/26/2025 (source)

Thoughtful

“He stands out because he listens deeply and he asks thoughtful questions. As an entrepreneur and as a business owner, I’m super excited for him to see what that next adventure is.”

-Lisa Winton, owner, CEO of Winton Machine speaking about Ari Shapiro

Indeed.

Ari Shapiro

is on Substack, Instagram and has a website at arishapiro.work. He’s also long been a guest singer with the band Pink Martini. I’ll be excited to see what’s in store for his next chapter.

Now we turn our attention to how this week started.

Monday

The WSJ published a paper like it does six days a week. One showed up on my driveway.

newspaper on wooden barrel — Photo by Jennifer Burk on Unsplash

Jonathan Clements

When I was a kid, the WSJ had no pictures. Whenever there was a portrait, it was done in this dot-ink style (known as hedcut, gift link) that has become its signature and looks like this:

I share this because this is how I knew Johnathan Clements. He started writing a personal finance column called “Getting Going” in 1994 as I started college. It ran for many years and I've probably read most of them. His writing was clear, practical and impactful. As a young investor, I found his common sense counsel invaluable.

Jonathan died on Sunday and I read the news on Monday:

Jonathan Clements, Longtime WSJ Columnist, Dies at 62 (gift link)

Jason Zweig, writer of the WSJ’s Intelligent Investor column, wrote:

Last fall, Jonathan Clements, author of The Wall Street Journal’s long-running personal-finance column, “Getting Going,” wrote a gut-wrenching article for the Journal about his terminal cancer diagnosis.
Jesting at his own impending death, he proposed to the article’s editors that the headline should be “Getting Gone.”
Now he is gone. Clements, 62 years old, died in Philadelphia on Sunday, about a year-and-a-half after being diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer. Between 1994 and 2008, he wrote 1,009 columns on investing, financial planning, money and life for the Journal.
Clements was one of the first financial journalists to argue for index funds. His advocacy, he conceded in a 1999 column, was nearly an “obsession” that irked many readers.
In the 1990s, professional investors often derided index funds as inferior and a guarantee of mediocrity; Clements praised them as a sure way to minimize the risk of underperforming the market. Following the trail Clements had blazed, millions of investors eventually made index funds the building blocks of their portfolios….

I was one of them.

Last fall, I read the article Jason Zweig referenced above:

Some Final Personal-Finance Advice From Jonathan Clements (gift link)

This spring, Jason Zweig wrote:

After Jonathan shared his grim prognosis, some of his fans suggested establishing a journalism award named after him. “The world has enough journalism awards already,” Jonathan responded with a laugh. “Too many, in fact.”
He knew exactly what he wanted instead: to launch Roth IRA accounts for young people from poor families who have never invested before, with the objective of turning them into lifelong savers.

The WSJ’s Jonathan Clements Wants to Leave a Living Legacy (gift link)

That idea became the Jonathan Clements Getting Going on Savings Initiative.

Jason Zweig explains:

The initiative in Jonathan’s honor is a collaboration among three organizations: the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy, which seeks to promote the legacy of the late Vanguard Group founder; J-PAL North America, a leading behavioral-economics research organization I wrote about a few years ago; and the City of Boston’s Summer Youth Employment Program.

If you would like to join me in contributing to this initiative, here is a link:

Contribute

(And if you’d like to benefit others while benefiting yourself by reading some of his best columns, pick up a copy of The Best of Jonathan Clements: Timeless Advice for a Financial Life Well Lived. All royalties from this book will be donated to the program.)

In 2016, Jonathan started a site called HumbleDollar. I visited it on Monday and was surprised to see a post by Jonathan dated 9/22/2025. It began:

If this post is appearing, it means I’ve succumbed to cancer or one of its side effects. Please don’t feel sad for me. I’ve had a life filled with love, great experiences and wonderful career opportunities. Despite my demise at a relatively young age, I consider myself beyond fortunate.

Here was a man who wrote last year that:

Ever since I learned I had cancer and might have just a year to live, I’ve been working like crazy to make sure I bequeath a well-organized estate and leave my family in good financial shape. I’m determined to have as good a death as possible, not least from a financial point of view.

He then went on to outline the very practical steps he was taking. What a loving gesture for his family. And to have one final post written? Of course he would. A bit like Randy Pausch, Jonathan Clements is a quiet inspiration and reminder of the joy of being human. His full farewell post is worth a read. He signed off this way:

I faced the final months not with sorrow, but with great gratitude. I had spent almost my entire adult life doing what I love and surrounded by those that I love. Who could ask for more?

-Jonathan Clements, 9/22/2025 (source)

Indeed. May we all be so blessed.

Thank you, Jonathan.

HumbleDollar has a collection of tributes to Jonathan, in which Jason Zweig notes, “I have just lost a friend, and so have you.”

🎵Thank You for Being a Friend

Is there a journalist that has really impacted your life? Let us know in the comments.

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