Contributor

Roy J. Harris Jr.

Author, Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism

Roy J. Harris Jr., the author of Pulitzer's Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism, has been a reporter and editor for four decades. With The Wall Street Journal from 1971 to 1994, he served for six years as deputy chief of its 14-member Los Angeles bureau. His next 13 years were spent as a senior editor for The Economist Group's Boston-based CFO magazine. He currently writes on business, media and other topics from his home in Hingham, Mass..

During his years with CFO, Harris researched and wrote Pulitzer's Gold (University of Missouri Press, paperback edition, 2010), which offers case studies from among Pulitzer winners over nine decades of the nation's most prestigious award. From 2006 to 2007 he was national president of the American Society of Business Publication Editors, and he currently serves as president of its ASBPE Foundation. He regularly contributes articles about public service journalism and the Pulitzer Prizes to the Poynter Institute Web site. He has also taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Emerson College.

The son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Harris began his career working summers as a copy boy and later a reporter for the Post-Dispatch. After graduating from Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism he worked for the Los Angeles Times, where one of his assignments was helping cover the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After moving from Pittsburgh to Los Angeles for the Journal in 1974, he was the aerospace and defense industry reporter before becoming deputy bureau chief. He also wrote stories about airlines, entertainment and the business of sports, and covered the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.

He began work on Pulitzer's Gold, his first book, while he was senior editor at CFO, covering mergers and acquisitions, corporate finance and other business topics.

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