2008 Barlett & Steele Judges

LAURIE HAYS

Laurie Hays joins Bloomberg LP as Executive Editor for company news starting Aug. 4, 2008, focusing on developing in depth reporting for dozens of industries covered by beat reporters in 135 bureaus at the news service.

Prior to Bloomberg, Hays worked at The Wall Street Journal for 23 years, last serving as deputy managing editor in charge of investigative reporting in the U.S. and internationally, including guiding the paper's coverage of the subprime mortgage crisis. Before becoming deputy managing editor, Hays was National News editor from 2003 to 2007, overseeing the global news content of the Journal's U.S. edition and helping lead the integration of the Journal's print and online newsrooms, with an emphasis on developing exclusive news for all editions. In 2001, she ran reporting teams covering the New York coverage of 9/11. Her career at the Journal started in 1986 in Philadelphia where she worked as a reporter covering the chemical industry. She served as Moscow correspondent from 1990 to 1993, covering the demise of the Soviet Union and life and business in the new Russia. She returned to the U.S. to cover IBM and banking, then was named Atlanta Bureau Chief in 1998 and technology bureau chief in 2000. The reporting teams she has overseen have won the Pulitzer Prize, Loeb awards and a Scripps Howard award.

Hays is a 1979 graduate of Harvard College. She lives in Pelham, NY with her husband and two college-age daughters. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

STEPHEN KOEPP

As FORTUNE Executive Editor, Stephen Koepp supervises many print and online features including special issues such as FORTUNE 500 and America’s Most Admired Companies. Koepp arrived at FORTUNE in January 2007 from its sister publication TIME, where as Deputy Managing Editor he oversaw a restructuring and redesign of TIME.com, the magazine's website, in 2005-06. During that time, the site's monthly unique visitors grew by nearly 90%, to 4.1 million, and TIME.com won the "Website of the Year" award for 2006 in the business & news category from the Magazine Publishers of America.

As an editor at TIME, Koepp developed two of the magazine's bestselling franchises: Time’s annual cover story on American history, which began with an issue on Lewis & Clark, and the annual Mind & Body issue, which anticipated the growing interest in alternative approaches to health care. Koepp also created the magazine's 80th anniversary special, called "80 Days That Changed the World," which later became a book, and top-edited the inaugural edition of its annual "TIME 100" issue on the world's most influential people. He also edited the work of investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, whose series on Money & Politics won a National Magazine Award in 2001 in the public interest category.

Koepp, a Wisconsin native, received a B.A. degree (journalism major, German minor) from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 1978. After graduation he joined the Waukesha Freeman, a daily newspaper in Wisconsin, where he worked as a reporter and editor. He joined TIME as a correspondent in the magazine's Letters department, became a reporter in the business section later in the year and was promoted to staff writer in 1983 and senior editor in 1988. He wrote and edited cover stories on Ralph Lauren, the Walt Disney company, the buyout of RJR-Nabisco, the Simple Life, the Church of Scientology and the B.C.C.I. banking scandal. As editor of the Nation section and later its top editor, Koepp supervised coverage of the Clinton Administration, the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, and the 2000 Presidential election.

With his brother David, he also co-wrote the 1994 motion picture The Paper. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Lesley Alderman and two sons.

JIM NAUGHTON

Jim Naughton retired in September 2003 after seven years as president of The Poynter Institute.

Previously, he was executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 18 years at the newspaper, he also served as national/international news editor, metro editor, associate managing editor, deputy managing editor and managing editor. The newspaper was awarded 10 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism done under his direction.

From 1969 to 1977, Jim was a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. He covered urban affairs, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, the Nixon White House, the 1972 presidential candidacies of Edmund Muskie and George McGovern, Congress, the Senate Watergate Hearings, the House of Representatives Inquiry into the Impeachment of President Nixon, the Ford White House and the 1976 Republican candidacy of Gerald Ford. This made him, in effect, the Times' expert on losers.

From 1962 to 1969, he was a police, rewrite, federal, city hall, politics and state legislative reporter for The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He worked as a police reporter for WGAR radio during a four-month newspaper strike. Jim's love affair with newsgathering began his junior year in high school at The Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph; despite working there each summer from 1955 through 1960 as reporter, photographer, editor, editorial writer, copy editor and proofreader, he professes no culpability in its untimely death.

He was born (in 1938) in Pittsburgh, raised in Cleveland and graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1960. He served, with no discernible increase in hostilities, as an officer of the U.S. Marines from 1960 to 1962.  He and Diana Naughton, parents of four children and two grandsons, now live -- get this -- on Coffee Pot Boulevard in St. Petersburg. 

Jim was the recipient of a Sigma Delta Chi award for national correspondence in 1973 for writing of the fall of Spiro Agnew and a Press Club of Cleveland award for politics reporting in 1967 for writing about the rise of Mayor Carl Stokes. He was a visiting Marsh Professor of Journalism in 1977 and 1985 at the University of Michigan.

He was the only newspaper editor in America who had a chicken machine in his office, perhaps because his most notorious moment as a journalist could have been when he wore a chicken head to a President Ford news conference in 1976.

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Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism