When your writing is free—as it is with so much digital content today—your readers may not hold you to the highest standards. But when a subscription to your publication costs $1,575 annually, you’d better be a lot more than mildly entertaining.

That’s the position Marc Hochstein ’94 is in as editor-in-chief of American Banker, the New York-based trade publication for the banking industry. He’s helped his organization grow and sustain a strong readership by giving readers the critical perspective they need on changes in their industry and doing so in a fresh, occasionally cheeky manner.

…when the mortgage bubble burst, none of our readers should have been surprised.”
Marc Hochstein ’94

Consider a column he wrote in 2013 about Bitcoin and the way it allows individuals across the globe to find exemptions to government restrictions and do business together. Hochstein talked about using the digital monetary system to buy music from an Iranian composer and pianist just because he could:

“I bought the album, and found it wasn’t to my taste. It sounds like the kind of music you’d hear in the background while getting a microdermabrasion facial treatment with aromatherapy candles burning.”

It’s an excerpt that harkens back to Hochstein’s days at Johns Hopkins, where he served briefly as editor of The Black and Blue Jay (self-described as “Johns Hopkins’ only intentionally funny publication”). While he knew he wanted to be a journalist, he wasn’t too clear on how he’d do so. “There are a lot of very focused and serious people at Johns Hopkins, but I was not one of them.”

Still, he says his time as an undergraduate history major—taking classes with such professors as Orest Ranum, David Harvey, Bill Leslie, and Tristan Davies—refined his ability to do the careful thinking required of good writers.

While he later became known for his coverage of emerging trends and technology, Hochstein’s first job at Dow Jones in the mid-’90s involved grabbing faxes from the Federal Reserve and physically running them to reporters’ desks at the Dow Jones Newswires service.

He was thrilled when his next move swerved from nascent electronic information-sharing to American Banker’s daily newspaper format. A few years later, he was even more pumped to get hired at a high-quality magazine focused on New York real estate called Grid. “While the world was going digital, I was going the opposite way,” he says.

Along the way, he happened to be assigned some subjects that later would bear journalistic fruit. While at Dow Jones Newswires, he covered a little-known financial instrument called “asset-backed securities.” Later, at American Banker, he headed up the publication’s reporting on mortgages in the early 2000s, where knowledge of asset-backed securities and other semi-obscure instruments was handy.

He and his crew of reporters didn’t hesitate to describe the fragile platform on which much of the housing finance industry was built. “We were polite in our coverage, but when the mortgage bubble burst, none of our readers should have been surprised,” he says.

Hochstein’s prescience about trends in the financial and online worlds has earned him leadership roles in some of his organization’s most ground-breaking news outlets. He developed an opinion blog called BankThink that invites contributions from not just the typical leaders of the industry, but opposing views from representatives of consumer organizations and even the Occupy movement. He rose in the early morning to compile the popular Morning Scan newsletter, a succinct summary of the day’s financial reporting from the major news outlets.

And he initiated coverage of Bitcoin, the all-digital currency exchange system that carries much of the promise and the danger of the internet’s speed and power. Hochstein describes the insights he gained from reporting on Bitcoin as being like his “red pill” from the movie Matrix—it showed him the awkward reality of the accepted ways of conducting financial transactions.

For example, with Bitcoin, the seller can receive payment from a buyer in as little as 10 minutes. With banks, it’s often a two- or three-day process. And banks are in no hurry to speed that up. A few years ago, they couldn’t get agreement through their joint operating enterprise—the Automated Clearing House—to agree to same-day transactions, let alone real-time exchanges, he notes. While the world is increasingly moving away from analog systems, banking remains—for a variety of complex reasons—wedded to traditional methodologies, Hochstein observes.

Hochstein was named editor-in-chief of American Banker in July 2014, heading up what had been a daily print publication since 1836. While the forces of tradition and innovation are still in conflict in the industry itself, American Banker has chosen sides. In January 2016, it switched to an all-digital format.

Early in her casting career, Sunday “Sunny” Boling ’99 worked with Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington on his directorial debut, “Antwone Fisher.”

“It was just me and him in a room. He said hello and held out his hand, and I held out my water bottle,” she recalls, laughing. “He said, ‘Don’t I get to shake your hand?’ I was just so nervous.”

The experience taught Boling she needed to overcome being star-struck to succeed in the film industry. “The more you work in this business, the more you run into famous people, so it can’t be a moment of high anxiety,” says Boling, whose best-known casting credits to date include “Ice Age,” “One Hour Photo,” “Just Married,” and “Dude, Where’s My Car?”

Arguably, the most impressive entry on her resume is forming her own company, Morman Boling Casting, with business partner Meg Morman in late 2004. With a focus on independent films, Morman Boling has cast such acclaimed movies as “Waitress,” “Mississippi Damned,” “Natural Selection” (2011), and “Serious Moonlight.”

“Independent films tend to be passion projects with strong messages,” Boling says. “I thought it would be more interesting to work on passion projects. Also, I wanted to work on films with positive female characters and diversity. That’s easier to do with independent films.”

“Some people said we’d never make enough money to live,” Boling says. “But we made money from our first movie before we even filled out the paperwork to be a legal company. That was confirmation this could happen.”

The public generally doesn’t know what goes into casting, says Boling, noting that her work ranges from auditioning hundreds of actors for all of the speaking roles in a film to negotiating the hiring of cast members, as well as working closely with producers and production attorneys.

“Casting directors have a lot more say in the process than people realize,” Boling says. “It’s a collaborative effort with directors and producers and studio executives. The needs of each acting role will be different, depending on the project.”

A native of Knoxville, Tenn., Boling grew up with a passion for films. At Johns Hopkins, she decided to major in the Writing Seminars to gain a strong foundation in writing as a springboard to filmmaking.

“I knew I wanted to create content and tell stories,” she says. “The writing is something I still use all the time, even when I’m reading scripts and working with writers and directors. When you’re a good writer, people are impressed.”

After graduating, Boling was accepted into the Los Angeles Film Studies Center. The center helped Boling secure an internship at 20th Century Fox as a casting assistant. She immediately enjoyed the rigors of the job—working with actors on auditions, developing script-analysis themes with writers and directors, and being hands-on in office decision-making.

Boling says the film industry has changed a great deal over the past 15 years, with a widening gap between big-budget studio films and the small indies. “There’s nothing in the middle now, and that presents less opportunities for actors and less opportunities to make more money,” she says.

Boling most recently worked on the film “Hello, My Name Is Doris,” starring Sally Field, and is currently waiting to get the green light to cast two films: “Single Carefree Mellow” and “Kid You Not.” She also hopes to direct a few independent films and web series in the future.

But casting remains her calling. “The great casting directors I’ve worked under, they can see something deeper within people,” Boling says. “And the more you do it, the better you get at identifying those traits. I feel like I’ve gotten pretty good at it.”

What to do with a PhD in classical studies when you realize you don’t want to enter academia? As it turns out, you have more options than you might think.

Such was the discovery of Kristina Giannotta ’03 (PhD), now branch head of histories for the Histories and Archives Division of the Naval History and Heritage Command. It’s a role that marries research and culture with management, and Giannotta says her graduate studies at Johns Hopkins prepared her surprisingly well for this government career. Now in the position of hiring and managing historians, she makes a point of recommending that current grad students take advantage of every opportunity—travel, fellowships, new languages—to grow outside of academia as she did, saying those skills make all the difference in a potential employee.

“When you’re looking at 70 PhDs, how do you pick? How do I know you can think creatively?” she asks. “That’s one thing Hopkins did for me: I had to do a lot on my own, and it gave me courage to go out there and try something different.”

While earning her doctorate, Giannotta attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens on a Fulbright, studied in Florence for a summer, learned several languages, earned a master’s in archaeology in Glasgow, and studied at the Goethe Institute in Bonn. When she completed her degree, she moved to Munich to work on the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae, the largest Latin thesaurus in the world, and then to Hawaii for an ORISE fellowship from the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education. The fellowship morphed into a federal job with what is now the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, where she searched for the remains of soldiers missing from World War II in order to provide their families with an accounting of what happened to them. It was there, she says, that she began to appreciate just what her academic background brought to the table of government work.

“I knew German, French, and Italian, so I could read all the documents; I had research methodology and skills from Hopkins; and I had traveled abroad, so I knew the cultural skills that were needed,” she says.

In 2013, Giannotta moved to her current position in Washington, D.C. Her division serves as a kind of institutional memory for the Navy, she says; her staff of 22 employees analyzes documents from various periods in American history, producing books and histories for an audience that includes the public, Navy leadership, and members of Congress. More of a manager now than a researcher, she delights in leading her team and solving organizational and research problems.

“The way you approach problems and perceive problems and address problems—that, in management, is a skill set,” Giannotta says. “You have to read materials quickly and ascertain what are the fundamental issues here, what needs to be dealt with and what doesn’t, and not a lot of people are trained to think like that. It’s a different way of thinking that helps you grow into real-life problems and real-life management.”