Bloomberg’s O’Kelley hired by Columbia as business journalism professor

Bloomberg News executive editor Winnie O’Kelley has been hired by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as a professor of business journalism.

O’Kelley will lead the Business and Economics concentration of the Master of Arts program, which provides mid-career journalists the expertise needed to cover corporations and the economy with sophistication.

“Winnie’s knowledge of business is broad and deep and she has an inspiring record of successfully mentoring young and developing reporters,” said Steve Coll, dean of Columbia Journalism School, in a statement. “She brings with her strong ideas about evolving our program for the era of disruption and rapidly changing technology that is all around us, and which makes business journalism such an exciting field.”

O’Kelley is an industry veteran known for her outstanding journalistic career as an editor on business and finance, with a specialty in economic impact and corporate wrongdoing.

She served as executive editor for Bloomberg News covering government, legal issues and financial regulation. In this role, she managed several hundred journalists around the world, overseeing news and enterprise stories at the intersection of power and business, including financial fraud, cybersecurity and privacy and health care fraud.

Additionally, she was executive editor of the Washington bureau.

More recently, she created a global financial investigations team that covers everything from Russian money laundering and sanctions violations to corporate accounting shenanigans and collusion. O’Kelley, who will continue in that role, is also a regular guest on Bloomberg TV, providing context and analysis on the latest financial headlines.

Prior to Bloomberg, O’Kelley worked for 20 years at The New York Times, where she held several leadership roles.  She was David Kocieniewski’s editor on his Pulitzer Prize-winning series on tax avoidance, “But Nobody Pays That.”

As the deputy business editor, she managed the paper’s coverage of the 2008 financial crisis and its aftermath.