Robert Merry interviews Norman Pearlstine, American editor and media executive, about the state of American journalism, our nation, and the world.
NORMAN PEARLSTINE
Norman Pearlstine is an American journalist who has held senior editorial positions at The Wall Street Journal, Time Inc. and Time Warner, Bloomberg LP, the Los Angeles Times, and Forbes.
After graduating from Haverford College and the law school of The University of Pennsylvania, Pearlstine joined The Wall Street Journal. He spent 23 of the next 25 years at the Journal, beginning as a staff reporter in Dallas, Detroit, and Los Angeles before becoming its North Asia bureau chief based in Tokyo. He helped launch the Journal's international editions, serving as The Asian Wall Street Journal's Managing Editor in Hong Kong and The Wall Street Journal Europe's Editor and Publisher in Brussels. He then spent nine years in New York, where he was its top news editor. (His years at the Journal were interrupted by a two-year stint as Forbes's Executive Editor for West Coast and Pacific, based in Los Angeles.)
From 1995 through 2005, Pearlstine served as Editor in Chief of Time Warner and then Time Inc. He was responsible for the words and pictures in more than 150 publications, including TIME, FORTUNE, PEOPLE, Sports Illustrated, In Style, Entertainment Weekly, and Sunset. He also had publishing responsibility for Time Inc.'s international, digital, and video products for several years.
After leaving Time Inc, Pearlstine joined The Carlyle Group as Senior Adviser for Telecom and Media. He then worked at Bloomberg LP for five years as Chief Content Officer and simultaneously as Chairman of Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg Government.
Pearlstine returned to Time Inc. as its Chief Content Officer in October 2013. He was subsequently named Time Inc’s Vice Chairman. After retiring from Time Inc. in 2017, Pearlstine joined Money.Net, a service using machine learning, including AI, to replicate essential elements of the Bloomberg terminal, as Chief Information Architect.
Then, in 2018, Pearlstine became Executive Editor of the Los Angeles Times after Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong acquired it from Tribune Corp. He held that position through December 2020.
Pearlstine serves on the boards of the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and the Center for Communication, Leadership & Policy at USC Annenberg. He also serves as an advisor to North Base Media, a venture firm that invests in emerging market media companies.
Pearlstine previously served on the boards of the Carnegie Corporation, the New-York Historical Society, the Tribeca Film Institute, the Sundance Institute, and Inside Climate News. From 2006 through 2012, he served as President and CEO of the American Academy in Berlin. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the Asia Society.
Pearlstine is the author of OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources. In 2005 he received the American Society of Magazine Editors Lifetime Achievement Award. He also received a Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000, and he received the National Press Foundation's Editor of the Year Award in 1989.
TICKETS
$50 | Premium
$35 | Standard