Seib, O’Kelley win special Loebs

The 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award among the Gerald Loeb Awards for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism  recipient is Jerry Seib, deputy managing editor and Washington bureau chief at The Wall Street Journal.

This annual award recognizes an individual whose career exemplifies the consistent and superior insight and professional skills necessary to further the understanding of business, financial and economic issues.

In his current role, he writes the paper’s weekly Capital Journal column, helps oversee the Journal’s political content online, and oversees a group of investigative reporters.

At other points in his Journal career, he has served as the Journal’s Washington bureau chief and deputy bureau chief, its political editor, and its White House reporter and diplomatic correspondent. He also served in the Middle East for the Journal, based in Cairo and traveling across the region.

Winnie O’Kelley, deputy business editor at The New York Times, will receive the 2012 Lawrence Minard Editor Award, named in memory of Laury Minard, founding editor of Forbes Global and a former final judge for the Loeb Awards.

This award honors excellence in business, financial and economic journalism editing and recognizes an editor whose work does not receive a byline or whose face does not appear on the air for the work covered.

O’Kelley directs the paper’s reporting on the economy and helps shape the overall business coverage. For the last three years, she has played a key role overseeing the housing collapse and mortgage bust as well as the recession and financial crisis.

For most of her career at the Times, O’Kelley has worked in the business news department, frequently with primary oversight of financial markets. Her work encompassed the recovery of Wall Street from the September 11, 2001, attacks and in subsequent years a round of financial scandals that brought down several companies, including Enron and WorldCom and the accounting firm Arthur Andersen. The lead financial columnist, Gretchen Morgenson, won a Pulitzer Prize for her work during this time.

As assistant business and financial editor, O’Kelley oversaw the paper’s coverage of the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, the hedge fund that threatened the financial markets.