Chris Welles

Christopher Jewett "Chris" Welles (December 11, 1937 – June 19, 2010) was an American business journalist who wrote for Life, BusinessWeek, The Saturday Evening Post and The Los Angeles Times, in addition to a number of books on business topics. Welles headed the Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Welles was born on December 11, 1937, in Boston and adopted by textile salesman Clement Welles and his wife Grace Blauvelt Welles, a pediatrician. He earned his undergraduate degree from Princeton University in 1959 and enlisted in the United States Navy, where he served until 1962.

After completing his military service, he was hired as a researcher by Life magazine. An article he had written about the neglect of American oil shale reserves by the petroleum industry that Life turned down was expanded into book form and published in 1970 as The Elusive Bonanza: The Story of Oil Shale, America's Richest and Most Neglected Natural Resource. Life fired him after he sold the piece to Harper's Magazine. His 1975 book The Last Days of the Club documented the decline and fall of old Wall Street institutions and the ascendancy of new companies that would come to replace them.

Welles joined the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1977, where he headed the Walter Bagehot Fellowship Program in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia, which would later be renamed the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship Program. The fellowship program was established to provide business journalists with the opportunity to hone their craft. Mobil Corporation, a longtime sponsor of the fellowship, backed out of its financial support in retaliation for Welles' earlier writings about the oil industry, stating that the company "didn't have confidence in the leadership" of the program. Welles remained as head of the fellowship until 1985.

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