Norman Pearlstine

Norman Pearlstine (born October 4, 1942, in Philadelphia) is an American magazine editor.

Biography

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 and later did postgraduate work at the law school of Southern Methodist University.

Pearlstine worked for the Wall Street Journal from 1968 to 1992, except for a two-year period, 1978–1980, when he was an executive editor for Forbes magazine. At the Journal, he served as a staff reporter in Dallas, Detroit, and Los Angeles (1968–73); Tokyo bureau chief (1973–76); managing editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal (1976–78); national editor (1980–81); editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe (1982–83); managing editor (1983–91); and executive editor (1991–92).

He was named as the interim president of the New-York Historical Society in 1992.^[1]

After leaving the Wall Street Journal he launched SmartMoney and was later the general partner of Friday Holdings, a multimedia investment company, prior to succeeding Jason McManus as editor in chief at Time in 1995. He was editor in chief of Time Inc., where he served between January 1, 1995,^[2] and December 31, 2005. At the end of his tenure, he was responsible for the content of Time Inc.'s 154 publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, In Style, Money, People, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, and Time.^[2] Through 2006, he served as a senior adviser to Time Warner.

Pearlstine was a senior adviser to the Carlyle Group's telecommunications and media group in New York.^[3][4] Pearlstine then joined Bloomberg L.P. in June 2008 as Chief Content Officer, a newly created position.^[5] In that role Pearlstine was charged with seeking growth opportunities for Bloomberg’s television, radio, magazine, and online products and to make the most of the company’s news operations. Pearlstine also served as Chairman of Bloomberg Businessweek, the magazine Bloomberg L.P. acquired fromMcGraw-Hill in 2009, and as Co-Chairman of Bloomberg Government, a web-based subscription service devoted tocoverage of the impact of government actions on business, including legislation, regulation, and contracts.^[6]

In October 2013, Pearlstine returned to Time Inc. as chief content officer, a position similar to the one he held at Bloomberg.^[7]

Personal

He is married to Jane Boon, an industrial engineer.^[8] Previously, he was married to the writer Nancy Friday from 1988 to 2005.

Recognition

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.^[9] He was honored with the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000.^[10] He received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1989.

Pearlstine serves on the boards of the Carnegie Corporation,^[11] the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Tribeca Film Institute, and the Watson Institute for International Relations. He serves on the advisory board of the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and he is co-chairman of the Center on Communication Leadership and Policy at the USC Annenberg School of Communications. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.^[12] From 2006 to 2011, Pearlstine served as president and CEO of the American Academy Berlin.^[13]

Pearlstine was briefly part of the controversy surrounding Matthew Cooper when he acted on a U.S. court subpoena to hand Cooper’s notes to the independent prosecutor investigating the outing of Valerie Plame as a covert agent of the CIA.^[14] From this experience, Pearlstine wrote a book entitled Off the Record: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources for Farrar, Straus and Giroux. It was published in hardcover in June 2007,^[15][16] and in soft cover in June 2008.

References

External links

• Official website