Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News president of editorial who has played a major role in shaping financial coverage at the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and NBC News, has been named the latest recipient of the New York Financial Writers’ Association’s prestigious Elliott V. Bell Award.
In 2025, Blumenstein was awarded a News & Doc Emmy in the long form category for NBC News’s exclusive interview with President Biden during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Prior to joining NBC News, Blumenstein was a deputy managing editor at The Times. In that role she led an expansion and elevation of the Business report and ensured The Times remained an essential destination for live coverage and breaking news.
Blumenstein served as deputy editor, Publisher’s Office, from February 2021 to May 2022. She worked closely with Times Publisher A.G. Sulzberger to support The Times’s rapidly growing journalism operations. She spearheaded a pivotal revamp of The Times’s policy on social media, investigations and outside projects. During the intense news year 2020, she led the news desk and a dramatic expansion of live coverage of the pandemic, and the election.
Prior to joining The Times, Blumenstein was deputy editor in chief of The Journal. Before that, she was deputy managing editor, Page One editor and international editor. She served as managing editor of WSJ.com and as the China bureau chief from 2005-2009. She steered coverage of China as it rose from the fifth to second-largest economy in the world and led the team that won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting for their “Naked Capitalism” series.
The Elliott V. Bell Award, which was created in 1976, honors journalists who have made a significant contribution to the field of financial journalism and is named after NYFWA’s inaugural president Elliott V. Bell.
Blumenstein joins a list of Bell Award alumni that includes the likes of Marty Schenker, David Faber, Myron Kandel, Ellen Pollock, Andy Serwer and Paul Steiger, among others.
