Founding Co-Chair Emeritus
Norman Pearlstine is Senior Advisor to Patrick Soon-Shiong, Executive Chairman of the Los Angeles Times. Pearlstine joined The Los Angeles Times in 2018 as Executive Editor, a role he held until December 2020.
Prior to joining The Times, he previously worked as an editor and reporter for five decades in the U.S., Asia, and Europe. In 2013 he returned to Time Inc., first as Chief Content Officer and then as Vice Chairman, a position he held until he retired from it in 2017.
This followed his three year tenure as Executive Vice President and Chief Content Officer at Time Inc. and a five year tenure at Bloomberg L.P. from June 2008 as its chief content officer, a position created for Pearlstine. In this role, Pearlstine was charged with seeking growth opportunities for Bloomberg’s television, radio, magazine and online products and to make the most of the company’s news operations. He is expected to have a similar role at Time Inc.
Prior to joining Bloomberg, Pearlstine was a senior advisor to The Carlyle Group‘s telecommunications and media group in New York. Before joining the private equity firm, he had spent nearly four decades working as a reporter and editor. He was editor-in-chief of Time Inc., the magazine subsidiary of Time Warner Inc., from 1995 through 2005 before becoming a senior advisor to Time Warner. Prior to joining Time Inc., Pearlstine worked for The Wall Street Journal, Forbes magazine and launched Smart Money magazine. Pearlstine also was general partner of Friday Holdings L.P., a multimedia investment company.
In January 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors named him the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted him into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. He was honored with the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000. He received the National Press Foundation‘s Editor of the Year Award in 1989.
Pearlstine currently serves on the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press steering committee. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. He formerly served as President of The American Academy in Berlin and on the boards of the Carnegie Corp., the Tribeca Film Institute and the Sundance Institute.
He received his B.A. from Haverford College, his L.L.B. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he did postgraduate work at the law school of Southern Methodist University. He is a member of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia.
Pearlstine is the author of OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources.