Norman Pearlstine

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Norman Pearlstine (born October 4, 1942, in Philadelphia) is the former editor in chief of Time Inc.. He served as editor in chief between January 1, 1995, ^[1] and December 31, 2005. At the end of his tenure, he was responsible for the content of Time Inc's 154 publications^[2]. Through 2006, he served as a senior advisor to Time Warner. In September 2006, he joined The Carlyle Group as a senior advisor to the firm's telecommunications and media group^[3].

He married writer Nancy Friday in 1988 and they were divorced in 2005. In April the same year he married Jane Boon, an industrial engineer^[4].

He graduated from The Hill School and then received an AB in History from Haverford College. He later obtained a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Before joining TIME, he worked for the Wall Street Journal (1968-1992). At the Journal, he served as a staff reporter in Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles (1968-1973); Tokyo bureau chief (1973-1976); managing editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal (1976-1978); national editor (1980-1981); editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe (1982-1983); managing editor (1983-1991); and executive editor (1991-1992). After leaving the Wall Street Journal he launched SmartMoney, and was later the general partner of Friday Holdings L.P., a multimedia investment company, prior to joining Time Inc.

In January 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors named Pearlstine the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted him into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame^[5]. He was honored with the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000^[6]. He received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1989.

In 2005 he joined the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation^[7]. In 2006 he was elected President and CEO of the American Academy in Berlin^[8]. He is also on the board of the Berlin School of Creative Leadership, an institute which provides MBAs to top creative executives from media, journalism, entertainment, advertising and marketing^[9].

Pearlstine was briefly part of the controversy surrounding Matthew Cooper when he acted on a US court subpoena to hand Cooper's notes to the independent prosecutor investigating the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert agent of the CIA^[10]. From this experience, Pearlstine is writing a book entitled Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It will be published in June 2007^[11].