Click on the play button at the bottom of the frame to hear Roy Harris speak about the courage of Pulitzer Prize-winning reporters, particularly those who covered Hurricane Katrina in 2005 for the Times-Picayune of New Orleans and the Sun Herald of Gulfport-Biloxi, Miss.
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The entire 30-minute interview on Connie Martinson Talks Books
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The Author
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Roy J. Harris Jr. rjharrisjr@aol.com Roy Harris has been a journalist for some of the nation's most respected news publications for four decades. From 1971 to 1994 he served as a reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, including 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, writing feature stories, covering corporate finance and helping manage the CFO.com Web site. He spent 2011 and the first part of 2012 as editorial director of CFOworld, launching the online site for Framingham, Mass.-based International Data Group. During his years with CFO, from 2006 to 2007 Harris was national president of the American Society of Business Publication Editors, a group of 800 business-to-business editors. He currently serves as president of the ASBPE Foundation. He regularly contributes articles on the media and on the Pulitzer Prizes to the web site of the St. Petersburg, Florida-based Poynter Institute. He has also taught journalism as an adjunct professor at Emerson College, and has appeared as a guest lecturer at journalism schools across the country. |
The son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Harris began his career working summers as a copyboy and later a reporter for the Post-Dispatch. In college, he served as managing editor of the Daily Northwestern while attending Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism. After graduation he took a job reporting for the Los Angeles Times, where one of his assignments was helping cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. After being posted by the U.S. Army to Germany, where he edited a battalion newspaper, Harris returned to Northwestern to earn his masters degree, and then joined the Journal in Pittsburgh, covering the aluminum industry. In 1974 he moved to the West Coast for the Journal and took over coverage of the aerospace beat, while also writing about airlines, entertainment and sports-including the 1984 Summer Olympics. As deputy bureau chief, he helped coordinate coverage of such stories as the 1992 race rioting that followed the police beating of Rodney King, and the devastating 1994 Northridge earthquake. His research for Pulitzer's Gold began in 2002, when he returned to St. Louis to make a presentation, on the hundredth anniversary of his father's birth, about the five Public Service Pulitzers won by the Post-Dispatch. |
 Author Harris began his journalism career at Joseph Pulitzer's St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Pictured are sons Joseph Pulitzer II and Joseph Pulitzer III, who not only ran the paper, but chaired the Pulitzer Prize Board. |
Harris lives in Hingham, Massachusetts, with his wife Eileen Carol McIntyre, senior director of investor relations and corporate communications for Cubist Pharmaceuticals Inc. He has two sons, David McKenna Harris and R. J. Harris III, and a stepson, Jesse D. Laymon. |
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