The distinction is bestowed on those journalists whose dedication, foresight, and talents have had a transformative impact on the profession.
“Steve was recognized by his peers for his agility in redefining Reuters’s mission to extend beyond delivering news rapidly to also providing context, background, and greater depth,” said Dean Rotbart, chair and editor-in-chief of the Business News Visionary Awards.
Adler’s oral history and a profile are available at NewsLuminaries.com and will be featured in a commemorative book to be published in 2021.
“During a period of enormous upheaval in the news business, Steve has also managed to stay true to Reuters’s core values and culture, which have distinguished the organization since its founding almost 170 years ago,” Rotbart added.
The Business News Visionary Awards are a continuation of the Business News Luminary Awards, which, in 2000, honored the 100 top business and financial journalists of the 20th century.
“The goal of this project extends beyond the celebration of the specific men and women who are profiled,” noted Terri Thompson, who introduces each journalist’s oral history.
“It is also to educate the public about the high standards to which these and so many other dedicated journalists have adhered and to offer a proven playbook for other journalists and journalism students to follow,” she says. Thompson is the former director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University.
Rotbart is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated, award-winning financial journalist, former columnist with The Wall Street Journal, and a news entrepreneur. He, along with a panel of more than two dozen distinguished nominating judges – including past award recipients and top business news organization editors and reporters – is responsible for the selection of the 2020 class of honorees.
Adler joined Reuters in January 2010 after having led or worked in senior newsroom management positions at BusinessWeek, The Wall Street Journal, and The American Lawyer. His duties at Reuters, which employs roughly 2,500 journalists based in 120 countries, encompass editorial strategy and planning, personnel choices and career development, news technology, and labor relations, among other responsibilities.
“We’re fiercely competitive,” Adler tells Rotbart in his oral history. But Adler adds, “we try to be a very humane organization, to be aware of people’s career needs, and to be very actively concerned about diversity, about inclusion.”
In honoring Adler, the nominating judges also cited his extensive work on behalf of multiple nonprofit journalism organizations. Among his roles, Adler serves as chairman of Columbia Journalism Review’s board of overseers, chairman of the board of Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, and a member of the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists.
The Business News Visionary and News Luminary Awards are made possible, in part, by the support of Monday Morning Radio, a weekly podcast produced in cooperation with the nonprofit Wizard Academy and its founders, Roy H. and Pennie Williams; and Robert L. Dilenschneider and Joan Avagliano of The Dilenschneider Group, providing an unsurpassed level of communications counsel to global clients.
Additional support is provided by eReleases, delivering personal service and exceptional value to every customer; American Small Business Institute, a nonprofit providing video education for small business owners; Time in a Bottle Photography and its founder, Avital Rotbart, specializing in world-class portrait photography; and All Kids Bike®, a nonprofit movement to teach every child in America how to ride a bike in kindergarten.
