Steiger, Bryant, Quinn and Ingrassia highlight SABEW town hall meeting on financial crisis and the media

Former Wall Street Journal managing editor and ProPublica chief executive Paul Steiger will chair a “town hall” critique of the business media and the financial crisis to open the Society of American Business Editors and Writers Annual Conference 2009, April 26 in Denver.

A star-studded panel — personal finance columnist Jane Bryant Quinn, New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia, Columbia Journalism Review writer Dean Starkman and University of Michigan professor Greg Miller — will join Steiger in discussing scoops and successes, as well as criticism of the business media’s handling of the crisis story, and any lessons learned.

SABEW has formed a new partnership with the National Endowment for Financial Education, which advocates for enhanced economic literacy, to present this panel.

The Denver business community is invited to attend the discussion.

Paul Steiger left the Journal at the end of 2007 to launch ProPublica, an independent investigative journalism nonprofit. Under his leadership as managing editor from 1991 to 2007, the paper won 16 Pulitzer Prizes. Steiger is also the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists and a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

Bryant Quinn is a contributing editor of Newsweek and a columnist for Bloomberg News. She is the best-selling author of numerous books, has made countless television and speaking appearances and is frequently described as the nation’s leading personal finance writer. She was named by the World Almanac as one of the 25 most influential women in the United States.

Larry Ingrassia joined the Times in 2004 after 25 years at the Wall Street Journal. At the Journal, he rose to become assistant managing editor, was editor of the paper’s Money & Investing section and served as its bureau chief in Boston and in London.

Dean Starkman runs The Audit, an online critique of financial journalism that is part of the Columbia Journalism Review. Previously, he spent eight years as a reporter for the Journal, covering white collar crime, the paper industry, real estate and eminent domain.

Greg Miller teaches accounting at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Before joining the faculty there, he taught for 10 years at the Harvard Business School. At Harvard, Miller’s research found that business journalists identified problems in nearly a third of 260 accounting fraud cases, before the Securities and Exchange Commission or the companies involved disclosed that they were targets of investigations.

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