Ingrassia named to Dow Jones Special Committee

The Dow Jones Special Committee, formed under an Agreement between the former shareholders of Dow Jones & Co. and News Corp. in December 2007, announced Monday that Lawrence Ingrassia, a longtime Wall Street Journal reporter and editor who subsequently served as deputy managing editor of The New York Times and managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, has been appointed to the five-member committee, effective immediately.

The vacancy on the committee was created by the death last September of his brother, Paul Ingrassia, a former managing editor of Reuters who had previously worked at the Journal for 31 years as a reporter, bureau chief and president of Dow Jones Newswires. After retiring from active journalism, he was appointed to the Special Committee in late 2016.

The committee is an independent body charged with safeguarding the editorial independence of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires as well as monitoring their adherence to the highest ethical and professional standards.

Lawrence Ingrassia worked at The Wall Street Journal from 1978 to 2004. As London bureau chief, he directed coverage of the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank which won the Overseas Press Club of America award for Best Business Reporting. Subsequently, as Money & Investing editor in the early 2000s, he helped direct a Journal staff that won Pulitzer Prizes for its coverage of the World Trade Center attacks and corporate scandals in the wake of the dot.com bubble.

Ingrassia was named business and financial editor of the New York Times in January 2004. In 2009 he was awarded the Minard Award given by the Gerald Loeb Awards for directing the Times’ coverage of the causes of the 2008 financial crash. He subsequently served as managing editor of the Los Angeles Times from early 2015 to late 2017, when he retired. In 2017 he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Ingrassia is the author of “Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy,” published in January by Henry Holt & Co., a Macmillan imprint.

The other members of the Special Committee are Thomas Bray, chair; Louis Boccardi, secretary; Cynthia A. Glassman; and Anne W. Patterson.