QM Events

April 12, 2016     ARCHIVES

Media Guru: Paul Steiger,  ProPublica Founding EiC and Board Chair

Paul Steiger has had a unique career; he rose to the top of a traditional journalism company, and then started over to create and run one of the most successful non-traditional journalism properties.

Steiger, Executive Chairman of the innovative news organization ProPublica, is the April Media Guru. He will speak off-the-record in a fireside chat format discussing how, over the course of his career, he has guided complex news organizations to run efficiently and innovatively – all while producing high quality, Pulitzer-worthy stories.

ProPublica is the non-profit, non-partisan newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest. The organization was an important early user of digital technology to enhance journalists’ ability to do deep investigative work and to distribute it widely. And Steiger led it all—as the triple threat of editor-in-chief, CEO and president from 2008 through 2012.

As Executive Chairman beginning January 1, 2013, he remains actively involved on strategic issues, development, representing ProPublica in public venues, and consulting with management on business and editorial issues on a part-time basis. He also speaks and consults on journalistic issues in the United States and overseas.

Before founding ProPublica, Steiger served as the managing editor of the Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 2007. During his tenure, members of the Journal’s newsroom staff were awarded 16 Pulitzer Prizes. In addition, ProPublica reporters received Pulitzer Prizes in May 2010 and 2011.

Steiger explained in an interview, “the fundamental difference between the way I approach investigative reporting at ProPublica versus the way I approached it at the Wall Street Journal is that we ask one more question…. ‘Does this project have the potential to produce change?’” ProPublica strives to be non-partisan in order to create extremely reliable information that citizens can “rely on for decisions that are important.”

Steiger is a member of the steering committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which provides free legal assistance to journalists. He is a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation that funds efforts to enhance journalism and the functioning of American communities. He is a board member and treasurer of the Paris-based Global Editors Network. From 1999 to 2007, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, serving as its chairman in his final year. For six years, from June 2005 to June 2011, Steiger served as chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists, a nonprofit that advocates for press freedom around the globe.

Steiger worked for 15 years as a reporter, the Washington economics correspondent, and the business editor for the Los Angeles Times, and for 26 years as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal. He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale University in 1964. In 2013 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by Columbia University.

Awards include the Columbia Journalism Award, the University of Missouri Honor Medal for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center, the Gerald Loeb Award for lifetime achievement from the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, the William Allen White National Citation from the University of Kansas’s White School of Journalism and Mass Communications, the University of Arizona’s John Peter and Anna Catherine Zenger Award, the Dean’s Medal for Distinguished Leadership from Brandeis University, the Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the National Press Foundation’s George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award, the Decade of Excellence Award from the World Leadership Forum in London, and the American Society of News Editors Leadership Award.

About Media Guru

SPEAKER EVENTS WITH MEDIA INDUSTRY LEADERS