The Ticker, founded in 1932, was the student-run newspaper of City College’s Downtown Campus and in 2022 it celebrated its 90th anniversary as Baruch College’s undergraduate student-run newspaper. To honor and celebrate the legacy of The Ticker and the members who have kept it running, the News section will be publishing profiles of former Ticker members throughout the years.

Steven Scheer is a Baruch and Ticker alumnus who is the current economics correspondent for Reuters’s Jerusalem bureau.

After transferring from Queens College, Scheer spent his three years at Baruch working at The Ticker first as a sports reporter and later as a news reporter.

“I wanted to be a sports reporter,” Scheer said. “I covered the men’s baseball team, the men’s basketball team and the women’s tennis team, if I’m not mistaken. It was really cool.”

When he first started college, he wanted to go into computer science, but at his father’s suggestion, he tried accounting and later transitioned to advertising. It was his experience at The Ticker that led him to journalism.

“I just loved it,” he said. “It was a lot of fun. It made me the journalist I am.”

Writing many stories over his three years with The Ticker gave him the opportunity to improve as a journalist, he said.

“I was able to develop,” Scheer said. “I think just being able to write and have editors who edited my stories and would point out things helped guide me. That’s really what journalism is, it’s like anything else, you practice and you just keep doing it over and over again. The more you write the better you get.”

After graduating in 1992, Scheer worked at The Norwich Bulletin for a year and a half, then moved to Dow Jones Newswires where he covered finance for three and a half years before starting at Reuters in 1996.

As a reporter for Reuters, Scheer lives in Israel and covers Israel’s economy, businesses and startup companies.

“I want to say I cover anything because everything is economics,” he said.

Scheer said his workday is shaped by economic indicators or a feature story he planned to work on, but is also largely dependent on what the news brings.

“There are days when I go into it, and I’m like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen today,” he said. “Sometimes things break all of a sudden.”

Because Reuters is an international news agency, Scheer also works on international stories.

“One of the great things about Reuters is that we’re global so we help out the global bureau,” Scheer said. “Right now, they’re asking about money moving around from Russian oligarchs because Israel’s got a couple of them that are dual citizens.”

The culture surrounding prominent figures is different in Israel, Scheer said.

“In the U.S., you couldn’t just go over to Alan Greenspan and start schmoozing with him and talking to him or any of these guys, they were very formal,” he said. “Here in Israel, you can go over to them, you can talk to them, you can have a conversation with them and it was not a big deal. I covered them, but we were friendly as well.”

As a correspondent in Israel, Scheer also did ground reporting during life and death moments.

“One of my toughest assignments was in 2005 when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip,” Scheer said. “I was sent there as embedded with the army, actually. And I was there for a week covering the pullout. It was probably the most memorable assignment I’ve ever had because we were getting shot at all the time by the Palestinians on the other side of the border and it was gutwrenching, just standing there and watching people just getting taken out of their houses, dragged out. It was a really tough assignment.”