The 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from the Gerald Loeb Awards is Stephen J. Adler, former editor-in-chief of Reuters.
The Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes a journalist whose career exemplifies the consistent superior insight and professional skills necessary to further the understanding of business, financial and economic issues.
Adler started his career as a reporter covering local and state government at the Tampa Times and the Tallahassee Democrat. Later, he joined The American Lawyer and, in 1988, The Wall Street Journal. During his 16 years at the Journal, he worked in various reporting and editing roles, managing reporting teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes. As deputy managing editor, he oversaw the award-winning Wall Street Journal Online, created the Wall Street Journal Books imprint, and co-taught the ethics and standards course required of all news employees.
In 2005, he became the editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek; during his five-year tenure, the magazine won over 100 major journalism awards.
In 2010, Adler joined Thomson Reuters as senior vice president and editorial director of the company’s Professional Division. He built and directed news operations there to deliver original journalism and relevant Reuters content to millions of subscribers. A year later, he was named editor-in-chief of Reuters and transformed the news organization into a modern newsroom that excelled in investigative reporting, data journalism and graphics.
Under his leadership, Reuters won eight Pulitzer Prizes for reporting and photography and seven Loeb awards. Between 2017 and 2019, Adler tirelessly worked to free the Reuters journalists arrested and imprisoned in Myanmar. His commitment to press freedom and journalists’ right to report the news without fear of harassment or harm has led to service on the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, where he has been chairman of the steering committee since 2019. He is the founder and director of a new Ethics and Journalism Initiative launched this fall at NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.
Adler is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. He is the author of “The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom,” which won the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. Along with his wife, the novelist Lisa Grunwald, he co-edited three popular historical anthologies: Letters of the Century, Women’s Letters and The Marriage Book.
