Pulitzer winner Stewart named winner of Bell award

James Stewart

James B. Stewart, a New York Times business columnist and award-winning financial journalist and author, is the 2011 winner of the Elliott V. Bell Award, honoring an individual’s lifetime contributions to the field of financial journalism, from the New York Financial Writers Association.

Stewart currently writes the “Common Sense” column for the Business Day section of The Times. In 1988, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Journalism for his articles in The Wall Street Journal about the 1987 dramatic upheaval in the stock market and insider trading. These writings led to the best-selling “Den of Thieves” that recounted the criminal conduct of Wall Street arbitrager Ivan Boesky and junk bond king, Michael Milken.

He was named page one editor of The Journal in 1988 and stayed with the paper until 1992 when he left to help found SmartMoney. DisneyWar, his 2005 book on Michael Eisner’s reign at Disney, won the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book.

He is the author of 11 books including “Tangled Webs: How False Statements are Undermining America from Martha Stewart to Bernie Madoff” and “Blind Eye: The Terrifying Story Of A Doctor Who Got Away With Murder,” which won the 2000 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.

He also won the George Polk Award in 1987 and Gerald Loeb awards in 1987, 1988 and 2006. Trained as a lawyer, he was previously the executive editor of American Lawyer magazine. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker.

He is a graduate of DePauw University, where he serves on the board, Harvard Law School, and Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism where he is now Bloomberg Professor of Business and Economic Journalism.

The NYFWA membership is invited to Bell Award presentation ceremony on Wednesday, Oct. 19, at 7 p.m., at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, 219 West 40th Street. There will be a wine and cheese reception following the award presentation. Send RSVPs to nyfwa@aol.com. Your name must be on the list to be admitted to the CUNY building.

For a list of previous winners, see here. Bell was editor and publisher of BusinessWeek from 1950 to 1967.

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.