Nick Baker had journalism in his blood from the start. His grandfather was a journalist and an influential person in his life. When his grandfather died during Baker’s high school years, he made the split-second decision to follow a career path to journalism.
He had an internship at a radio station and then studied journalism at Ohio University. He liked journalism, but was not sure what his future held. Then he applied for a Dow Jones News Fund internship and that opened his eyes to the idea of financial journalism.
He ended up at Dow Jones Newswire in the summer of 2000 and saw the end of the internet bubble.
After college, he was eventually hired by Dow Jones Newswire after a hiring freeze ended. His first role was as a general assignment reporter and to watch CNBC all day and write up anything big that happened.
He wrote some of the stock market wraps at the end of the day and then was assigned to the bankruptcy beat, which at the time was all about Enron and Worldcom.
He moved on to telecom coverage at Dow Jones until 2005, when he moved on to Bloomberg and joined its stocks desk as a reporter.
After a couple of years he became an editor and then just after the financial crisis he became the team leader covering the U.S. and Canadian markets.
After a move to the Chicago area from New York, he started covering mergers and acquisitions for Bloomberg. Eventually he would move into the market structure coverage at Bloomberg, something he called “Lothian Territory.”
Matt Leising was part of that group and they covered it all, from derivatives exchanges to IEX and Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt, the Michael Lewis book.
Baker’s favorite part of Flash Boys was the chapter about Spread Networks. His previous coverage of telecoms and an uncle who was a Ham Radio operator may have been the reason, but it caught his attention.
In 2019, Baker and a colleague wrote a story about a fight between the CME Group and another company over the placement of an antenna in Aurora that would block the CME’s Aurora microwave antenna at its data center. This was a career highlight story for him, Baker said.
Baker said he started to pay attention to crypto when his colleague Matt Leising started to hear about it. Baker was Leising’s primary editor and edited the first crypto story in 2014.
He really came back to crypto in 2021, when he started to become intrigued by crypto market structure and bored by the stock market structure. When the opportunity to become the deputy editor-in-chief of CoinDesk came along, it seemed like the right thing to do.
