Amy Cortese

Amy Cortese

AMY CORTESE is an award-winning journalist who writes about topics spanning business, finance, food, wine and travel. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, New York, Business Week, the New York Times, the Daily News, Portfolio, Mother Jones, Afar, The American, the Daily Beast, Talk, Business 2.0, and Wired, among other publications. Her recently published book, Locavesting: The Revolution in Local Investing and How to Profit From it (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), draws upon her experience covering these diverse realms to explore how a small shift in investment away from multinationals towards locally-owned enterprises can reap enormous economic and social benefits for individuals, their communities and the country.

Amy also selectively consults and crafts white papers, annual reports and strategic literature for corporations and other organizations. She has been a contributing author at New Paradigm, a Toronto-based think tank with a research focus on technology, innovation and society, and has contributed to The Business of Wine (Greenwood Press, 2009).

Amy began her career covering high-tech from posts in Boston, New York and San Francisco, where she chronicled the fast-paced industry and its key players, including Microsoft, a colorful cast of dot-coms and the venture capitalists that funded them. As the Department Editor for Software at Business Week in the mid- to late-1990s, Amy wrote and edited many pivotal cover stories, features and commentaries illuminating the Microsoft antitrust saga, the rise of the Web, and the explosive innovation and entrepreneurial culture of Silicon Valley. Her 1995 cover story for the magazine, The Software Revolution, about the new world order ushered in by the Web, earned her a Computer Press Award for Expository Writing, and was one of three submitted cover stories that helped Business Week win the National Magazine Award for its category that year. Another 1995 article helped launch the moniker “Silicon Alley” for Manhattan’s fledgling multimedia corridor.

She joined Wit Capital, a pioneering online investment bank, in late 1998 as Senior Vice President and Director of Content. Wit Capital’s mission was to democratize the IPO process by allowing individual investors to get in on the era’s hot IPOs at the pre-offering price—something that was previously available only to institutional and well-connected individual investors. (Wit Capital acquired the bricks & mortar investment bank Soundview Technology Group in 2000, and the combined company was later acquired by Charles Schwab).

Amy left Wit in 2000 to begin a freelance career that allowed her to explore a broader range of journalistic interests. Her stories about sustainable business for the New York Times beginning in 2001 were among the paper’s first serious business coverage of the budding sustainability movement. As a freelance journalist, she has demonstrated a knack for spotting trends and producing buzz-generating stories, such as recent articles for the Times on barefoot running and Italian prosecco makers battling for turf, that zoomed to the top of the most-emailed list. She also penned a real estate column for the Times’ Sunday Business section for two years.

She has brought that same keen eye to her food and lifestyle writing, where she has introduced readers to the pleasures of domestic caviar, little known wines and off-the-beaten track travel destinations.

These eclectic interests informed the writing of her book, Locavesting, which takes readers inside the local investment movement and introduces them to the pioneers creating new models for funding locally-owned businesses—whether farmers, mom & pop shops or manufacturers. In the process, these citizens are building healthy, resilient communities and restoring a more inclusive and just form of capitalism.