Alumna treads path from footwear reporter to Fortune

Leigh Gallagher '94 speaks to students after delivering the Munschauer lecture.

Leigh Gallagher ’94 has come a long way from her job as the footwear reporter at a sporting goods trade publication. Now assistant managing editor at Fortune magazine, she said many of her career moves happened because of serendipity, not by having a well-defined career plan.

One thing remained at the forefront, Gallagher said, whenever she made a career decision: to focus on her “north star” – the work she loved in journalism, a “wonderful, fantastic profession.”

Gallagher, who was an English major, shared career advice and Cornell memories during a March 16 visit to campus as this year’s Munschauer lecturer, invited by the College of Arts and Sciences Career Development Center.

At Fortune, Gallagher writes and edits feature stories, helps steer the magazine’s editorial direction and co-chairs the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit and Fortune Brainstorm Tech conferences. She is the author of two books: “The End of the Suburbs: Where the American Dream Is Moving” (2014) and “The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions . . . and Created Plenty of Controversy” (2017).

At Cornell, Gallagher wrote news and feature stories for the Cornell Daily Sun, and was involved in activities including her sorority and the rowing team. Some of her memorable classes included those on French literature, psychology, history and an English class on Chaucer, Milton, Dreiser and Faulkner.

“I remember being swept away reading all of this amazing literature,” she said.

While her friends took jobs in consulting or pursued medical or legal careers, she fretted a bit about what would come next for her.

“I knew it wasn’t easy to get a job in magazines, but that’s what I wanted to do,” she said. So she wrote to several magazines, landed an unpaid internship at Philadelphia Magazine and moved home after graduation.

Knowing she wanted to move to New York City, she visited friends there and handed out resumes around the city. A serendipitous exit off the elevator at the wrong floor found her in a broadcasting studio, where she left a resume that led to a job offer at a video production company.

Her next job came as a result of old-fashioned job searching of the New York Times Sunday classifieds, the print version, she said. Her job at Sporting Goods Business introduced her to a whole new vocabulary. “People kept using this acronym – IPO – and I had no idea what they were talking about,” she said with a laugh.

Today, initial public offerings, depreciation and liquidity are key to Gallagher’s lexicon. After Sporting Goods Business, Gallagher became a reporter and editor at Forbes and SmartMoney before joining Fortune in 2007. She edited, wrote and helped launch Fortune Live, the publication’s weekly 30-minute video talk show in 2014. These days, she is a frequent guest on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CBS This Morning and National Public Radio’s Marketplace. She is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Although her first few tries at television were “really awful,” she said, working on a new show earlier in her career helped her gain confidence, and television and radio appearances have become a regular part of her routine.

Gallagher said when new opportunities were offered to her, she usually had someone in her corner, urging her to give it a try, whether she had expertise in that area or not.

“You need a mentor to push you to do something that you might not want to do,” she said. “You have to be willing to try new things and take big risks to be able to really find and follow your north star.”

Kathy Hovis is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.

Media Contact

Jeff Tyson