TOM HERMAN, a contributor to The Fiscal Times, wrote for The Wall Street Journal from 1968 until May 2009, when he retired to devote more time to teaching, writing and tennis. From mid-1993 until May 2009, he wrote The Wall Street Journal's weekly Tax Report. He continues to write a weekly column for The Wall Street Journal Sunday, a personal-finance section that appears in the Sunday business sections of many newspapers.

In the fall of 2006, 2007 and 2009, Mr. Herman taught a Yale College seminar: "Behind the Headlines: The Press, Business and the Economy." He is teaching a seminar on business and financial-news coverage at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism this semester and taught a similar course at Columbia in 2009.

When he was a Yale undergraduate, Mr. Herman won a Newspaper Scholarship Fund award and worked as a reporter in The Wall Street Journal's Washington, D.C., bureau in the summer of 1967. He joined the Journal's New York bureau as a reporter in August 1968 and transferred in 1969 to the Atlanta bureau, covering subjects ranging from conservation to civil rights, from the Coca-Cola Company to the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy.

He returned to the New York bureau in 1974 and moved in 1976 to The Asian Wall Street Journal, covering Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and the Philippines.

In July 1977, Mr. Herman returned to The Wall Street Journal's New York bureau as a reporter. From 1980 through mid-1989, he wrote the daily "Credit Markets" column and covered investing, economics and the Federal Reserve. Beginning in mid-1989, while continuing to cover the financial markets, he specialized in investing and personal finance issues and wrote "Your Money Matters" columns for the front page of the Money & Investing section.

In January 1994, Mr. Herman became the Journal's Tax Report columnist and wrote that weekly column until he retired in 2009. He was named a Senior Special Writer in March 1994.

Mr. Herman is the co-author with Douglas R. Sease of The Flat-Tax Primer, a book published by Viking in April 1996. He also has contributed to several other books, including The Wall Street Journal Lifetime Guide to Money, published by Hyperion in 1997 and The Wall Street Journal Guide to Who's Who and What's What on Wall Street, published by Ballantine in 1998.

A native New Yorker and a graduate of the Browning School, Mr. Herman won the school's prize for journalism, and in 2002, he received the school's Alumnus Achievement Award. He received a bachelor's degree from Yale College in 1968 and was a reporter and later political editor for the Yale Daily News.

He and his wife, Marilyn, live in New York City.