Neil Barsky

Neil Barsky is a United States-based journalist, former hedge fund manager, filmmaker, and philanthropist, best known for making the 2012 film Koch and for founding The Marshall Project, a journalism nonprofit intended to shed light on the United States criminal justice system.

Barsky was born in the Bronx in New York City. He moved to Long Island and then New Jersey. In 1973, he returned to New York City, this time living in Long Island. He went to the Walden School for high school.

Barsky pursued his undergraduate studies at Oberlin College and a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia Journalism School.

Hedge fund manager

Barsky started work as an analyst for Morgan Stanley in 1993, working on commercial real estate and the gaming industry. Within a year, he got listed in the All-Star Analysts list of Institutional Investor.

In 1998, Barsky and fellow Morgan Stanley alumnus Scott M. Sipprelle started a hedge fund called Midtown Research. Barsky stayed with the fund till 2002. In November 2007, a few months before the global stock market collapse, Sipprelle closed down the fund. Sipprelle would subsequently become a venture capitalist and would also be the Republican candidate for the House of Representatives in 2010.

In 2002, Barsky left Midtown Research and opened his own hedge fund, Alson Capital Partners, named after his children, Alexandra and Davidson. The fund made successful investments in Sears Holdings and shorted newspaper and furniture companies. It also exited the housing sector in early 2006 before the bursting of the housing bubble, although Barsky incorrectly believed that there was no bubble. After correctly predicting the popularity of the Atkins diet, the fund shorted Panera Bread and Krispy Kreme.

At its peak, the fund would have $3.5 billion in assets under management. In 2008, as a result of the global financial crisis, Alson lost 24% of its assets, down to $1.5 billion, primarily due to its large holdings in energy and utility stocks, all of which fell more than 50% after producing big gains in previous years. At the end of May 2009, the fund shut down, returning $800 million to investors. Alson's former chief operating officer said that Barsky made sure that all employees had equity and got generous severance packages, so that the closure did not cause any of their lives to be ruined.

Over his entire career as an investor (August 1998 to March 2009) Barsky made an average 12.1% a year.

New York Times journalist Joe Nocera said that during his years as a hedge fund manager, Barsky was an important source of information about the workings of finance to Nocera, but was generally referenced anonymously because hedge fund managers feared that visibility would make investors think they weren't doing their job.

Journalist

Barsky's interest in journalism was sparked by a high school project on the effect of busing legislation on communities in Boston. He failed to get a journalism job right out of college, and therefore went to the Columbia Journalism School. In 1986, he started work in the news business, working the business desk at the New York Daily News. In 1988, he moved to the Wall Street Journal, where he covered commercial real estate and the gambling industry. He left the Journal in 1993 for a career in finance, that he would stay in till 2009. Despite being successful in finance, Barsky continued to identify as a journalist. In 2009, after shutting down his hedge fund, Barsky renewed his exploration of journalism.

Barsky has been skeptical of journalism's almost-exclusive reliance on advertising for revenue, a skepticism that also informed his decision to short newspaper companies while operating his hedge fund. As chairman of the board of overseers of the Columbia Journalism Review, he encouraged the organization to play an important role in coming up with new business models. He similarly pushed the nonprofit Youth Communications to think about what projects would financially sustain the organization.

Barsky's interest in new models for journalism would eventually lead him to co-found The Marshall Project along with former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller. First announced in November 2013 by Barsky, the project got Keller on board in February 2014.

Filmmaker

Barsky was inspired to work on documentaries after observing the success of Waiting for Superman and Gasland in sparking discussion about their respective underlying issues (charter schools and fracking). He produced and directed Koch, a documentary released in 2012 (and theatrically released February 2013) about the role that former New York City Mayor Ed Koch played in transforming the city in the 1980s.

Barsky was co-executive producer and director of the documentary Knuckleball!, the short documentary Witnesses NYC, and the Koch episode in the TV series documentary POV.

The Marshall Project is a nonprofit journalistic organization started by Barsky that aims to cover issues related to criminal justice in the United States.

In his byline for an op-ed for the New York Times in November 2013, Neil Barsky mentioned that he was working on The Marshall Project, with a one-sentence description and a link to a preliminary website. In February 2014, former New York Times executive editor Bill Keller announced that he was joining the project to lead the editorial team. The project had two of its investigative journalism pieces published in Slate and the Washington Post respectively, and it launched in November 2014 with funding from Barsky and many other sources, including the Ford Foundation.