Bloomberg reporter wins Welles prize

Greg Farrell is the winner of the 2011 Christopher J. Welles Prize for his book “Crash of the Titans,” which tells the story of the decline and fall of Merrill Lynch and its troubled sale to Bank of America.

The Welles Prize is awarded each year to a former Knight-Bagehot Fellow whose work most epitomizes Welles’s ideals of thorough reporting, good storytelling and timeliness. Farrell, who is currently a reporter for Bloomberg News, received a $500 cash prize at the 36th anniversary dinner celebration on Nov. 7.

Farrell joined Bloomberg on February and works on its legal team, writing about companies that are dealing with significant legal/regulatory issues.

Farrell had previously been at the Financial Times since 2008. Before that, he spent nine years at USA Today, where he covered marketing and advertising and then white collar crime.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University.

Welles is the former director of the Knight-Bagehot program who was also an editor at BusinessWeek magazine from 1986 to 1999. He died in 2010 at the age of 72.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.