The Author

Roy J. Harris Jr., a senior editor for The Economist Group's CFO magazine, 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 fourteen-member Los Angeles bureau.

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.

During his 12 years in Boston with CFO, he served from 2006 to 2007 as national president of an 800-member journalists' group, the American Society of Business Publication Editors. But he retained his passion for the newspaper business, regularly contributing articles 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. 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.