Stephen J. Adler, former president and editor-in-chief of Reuters, is chairman of the Steering Committee of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press.
A global advocate for free speech, journalist safety, and media literacy, Adler also chairs the Journalist Assistance Committee of the Committee to Protect Journalists and is a board member and immediate past chair at the Columbia Journalism Review. He teaches reporting ethics to journalism graduate students at NYU and Columbia and is a senior adviser at The Markup, an investigative newsroom that deploys data journalism to scrutinize major technology companies.
During his ten years at Reuters, Adler led the global news organization to eight Pulitzer Prizes for reporting and photography. Previously, he was editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek and, for 16 years, a reporter and editor at The Wall Street Journal, where he oversaw teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes. In addition to managing The Journal’s legal and investigative-reporting teams and creating The Wall Street Journal Books imprint, he co-taught the ethics and standards course required of all Dow Jones news employees.
Earlier, he was editor of The American Lawyer, where he was a National Magazine Award finalist for his on-the-ground coverage of the poison-gas disaster in Bhopal, India. Adler began his career as a reporter covering local and state government at The Tampa Times and The Tallahassee Democrat.
A graduate of Harvard College and the Harvard Law School, Adler is author of the book The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom, which won the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. With his wife, the novelist Lisa Grunwald, he was co-editor of three popular historical anthologies: Letters of the Century, Women’s Letters, and The Marriage Book. He has written op-eds for The New York Times and The Washington Post and is a frequent speaker at journalism conferences, universities, and public forums.