ProPublica Announces Management Succession

New York--ProPublica, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalism non-profit, has announced a management succession plan to take effect Jan. 1, 2013.  Paul Steiger, ProPublica’s founding editor-in-chief, president and CEO will continue at ProPublica in a senior capacity as executive chairman.  In that role, he will remain actively involved in strategic issues, development, representing ProPublica in public venues, and consulting with management on business and editorial issues as needed and on a part-time basis.

Succeeding Steiger as editor-in-chief will be Stephen Engelberg, ProPublica’s founding managing editor.  Succeeding Steiger as president will be Richard Tofel, ProPublica’s founding general manager. Tofel and Engelberg will serve as co-chief executive officers, and will report to the ProPublica board.

Before the founding of ProPublica at the beginning of 2008, Steiger served as the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 2007.  He worked for 15 years as a reporter, the Washington economics correspondent, and the business editor for the Los Angeles Times, and for 26 years at the Journal.  He is a trustee of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.  From 1999-2007, he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board, serving as its chairman in his final year.  From 2005-2011, Steiger was the chairman of the Committee to Protect Journalists.  Awards he has received include the Columbia Journalism Award, the University of Missouri Honor Award for Distinguished Service in Journalism, the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard University’s Joan Shorenstein Center, the Gerald Loeb Award for lifetime achievement from the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, the Dean’s Medal for Distinguished Leadership from Brandeis University, the Fourth Estate Award from the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., the National Press Foundation’s George Beveridge Editor of the Year Award, the Decade of Excellence Award from the World Leadership Forum in London, and the American Society of News Editors Leadership Award.

Tofel was the assistant publisher of The Wall Street Journal from 2002-2004 and, earlier, an assistant managing editor of the paper, vice president, corporate communications for its parent Dow Jones & Co., and an assistant general counsel of Dow Jones. More recently, he served as vice president, general counsel and secretary of the Rockefeller Foundation, and earlier as president and chief operating officer of the International Freedom Center, a museum and cultural center that was planned for the World Trade Center site. He is the author of six hardcover or ebooks, including Why American Newspapers Gave Away the Future (Now and Then Reader, 2012), and Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, The Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism (St. Martin's, 2009).  He is currently an adjunct professor of journalism at New York University, where he will teach a graduate studio course on journalistic innovation this fall.

Engelberg came to ProPublica from The Oregonian in Portland, where he had been a managing editor since 2002. Before joining The Oregonian, Mr. Engelberg worked for The New York Times for 18 years, including stints in Washington, D.C., and Warsaw, Poland, as well as in New York. Earlier he worked as a reporter for The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk and for The Dallas Morning News.  He was recently elected to membership on the Pulitzer Prize Board and the Board of Directors of the American Society of News Editors.  Engelberg shared in two George Polk Awards for reporting: the first, in 1989, for articles on nuclear proliferation; the second, in 1994, for articles on U.S. immigrations. A group of articles he co-authored in 1995 on an airplane crash was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. He started the Times’s investigative unit in 2000. Projects he supervised at the Times on Mexican corruption (published in 1997) and the rise of Al Qaeda (published beginning in January 2001) were awarded the Pulitzer Prize. During his years at The Oregonian, the paper won the Pulitzer for breaking news and was a finalist for its investigative work on methamphetamines and charities intended to help the disabled. He is the co-author of "Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War" (2001).