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 and New York Times Magazine, Business Week, 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 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 a Department Editor at Business Week in the mid-1990s, she 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.
In the late 90s, Amy was senior vice president & director of content at Wit Capital, a pioneering online investment bank. Wit’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.
As a freelance writer, Amy has explored a broad range of journalistic interests, from American caviar to Italian prosecco and clean energy to corporate polluters. 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—from Slow Money to crowdfunding to local stock exchanges. In the process, these citizens are building healthy, resilient communities and creating a more inclusive and just form of capitalism. Amy lives in Brooklyn, NY with her partner Robert, where they have experimented with growing everything from corn to cucuzza on their rooftop.