David Rivers—A Memorable Editorial Voice

It took considerably more than one beer for me to persuade David Rivers to abandon the security of the Dow Jones Capital Markets Report (and an occasional Wall Street Journal byline). The proposition was that he should join a small publishing company and launch a newsletter on the business of foreign exchange—not FX rates, mind you, but the FX business. Characteristically, David was anxious (and, also characteristically, his anxiety animated his whole body). But he agreed, and in the summer of 1990 the first issue of FX Week appeared. Thus began David’s career at Waters Information Services—a career as one of the smartest and most memorable editorial voices covering finance and technology.

With FX Week well established, in 1993 David agreed to become the founding editor of our new magazine on financial technology, a magazine he insisted on calling Waters, despite my initial misgivings. (Rivers and Waters, Rivers and Waters—the serendipity of the liquid connection was a never ending source of comment!) David was hard at work on the very first issue of Waters when a bomb went off in the basement of the World Trade Center, and he was instrumental in coordinating our coverage.

David was one of those magical editors whose methods were opaque to observers but whose results were invariably excellent. Watching him work was bewildering, an intense study in controlled chaos, but he always got the job done and did so with style and humor. Indeed, if anything animated his body more than anxiety, it was laughter. David was not shy about laughing.

A Manhattanite through and through, David moved fluidly between the worlds of finance and technology of his day job and the world of high fashion inhabited by his wife, Ricky Vider. (Thus his insistence that Waters be not only well written and forward-looking, but also striking and provocative to look at.) As a journalist he understood the parallels between the Seventh Avenue fashion district and the Wall Street financial district, and his nose for news and love of industry gossip were equally at home in both.

But perhaps David’s greatest contribution to the industry was in the example he set for young talent. An entire generation of financial and technology journalists worked for him or with him in New York and London, and today they populate not just the Risk Waters organization but the senior ranks of many of the industry’s most-respected publications. All will acknowledge that they owe him a great debt. For a man so young his legacy is large, and we all will miss him terribly.

Dennis Waters
Founder, Waters Information Services
Director, Risk Waters Group