Jesse Eisinger

Last updated
Jesse Eisinger
Jesse Eisinger, Beyond the Consumer Welfare Standard, Steigler Center, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, USA (cropped).jpg
Eisinger in 2023
Education Columbia College (BA)
OccupationJournalist
Employer ProPublica
Spouse Sarah Ellison
Awards Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting (2011)

Jesse Eisinger is an American journalist and author. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011, [1] he currently works as a senior reporter for ProPublica. [2] His first book, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2017. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

Contents

Eisinger's work has appeared in ProPublica, The New York Times , The Wall Street Journal , The Atlantic , The New Yorker website, and many other publications. [2]

Education

Eisinger is a 1992 graduate of Columbia College, where he majored in American Studies. [8]

Early career

Eisinger began his career with The South Pacific Mail in Santiago, Chile. He moved to Dow Jones Newswires and then TheStreet.com, where he covered biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. [9]

In 2000, Eisinger was hired by The Wall Street Journal Europe, where he wrote the thrice-weekly column "Heard in Europe" for two years. [9]

While working in Europe, Eisinger helped expose frauds at Lernout & Hauspie, a Belgian company specializing in voice recognition software, and Élan, an Irish pharmaceutical company. [9]

Financial and investigative reporting

Eisinger moved to New York in 2002 to write for The Wall Street Journal. His first column was called "Ahead of the Tape". After two years, he started writing a new financial column called “Long and Short”. [10]

In 2006, Eisinger joined the Conde Nast Portfolio as the magazine's Wall Street editor. His cover story in November 2007, titled Wall Street Requiem, [11] predicted the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers. [10]

Eisinger argued that Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Bear Stearns were similar to low-credit borrowers who took on riskier mortgages than they could really afford, thus likely to default, or in the case of the investment banks, especially Bear Stearns, likely to be acquired up by another or just go out of business. [11] [12]

"There is an end of the era feel to the whole thing...After all those years of investment bankers being mistakenly lambasted as rogues, it will be ironic if the moment Wall Street finally embraced its reputation became its undoing." [11] [13] - Jesse Eisinger, November 2007, Conde Nast Portfolio

In 2009, Eisinger was hired as a senior reporter by ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom. [10]

Pulitzer Prize

In 2009, Eisinger began work on a series of stories, The Wall Street Money Machine, [14] "that documented the lead up to the 2008 financial crisis", [15] revealing how Wall Street's morally questionable practices had led to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. [16]

Co-authored with Krista Kjellman Schmidt, and Jake Bernstein, and authored by Cora Currier, and Paul Steiger, the 2010-2014 5-year, 61-story series [14] was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2011. [17] It was the first Pulitzer Prize awarded to a group of stories published in a digital-only format. [16]

Other awards

Eisinger was a New America Fellow in 2016 and 2017. [18]

Eisinger's Wall Street series was also nominated for the 2011 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting. He would be nominated again for the Goldsmith in 2015 for a series of stories about the Red Cross, written with Justin Elliott of ProPublica and NPR’s Laura Sullivan. [18]

In 2015, Eisinger was honored with the Gerald Loeb Award for his Wall Street commentary. [18] [19]

Works

Personal life

Eisinger is married to fellow journalist Sarah Ellison. [20]

References

  1. ↑ "Winners, Finalists For The 2011 Pulitzer Prizes". NPR.org. April 18, 2011. Retrieved May 26, 2017.
  2. 1 2 "Jesse Eisinger". ProPublica . Retrieved May 26, 2017.
  3. ↑ Eisinger, Jesse (July 11, 2017). The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives. Simon & Schuster. ISBN   9781501121364.
  4. ↑ "Author-Lecture Series ft. Jesse Eisinger & Prof. Paul Zarowin". New York University Stern School of Business. 7 March 2019. Retrieved 4 August 2025– via YouTube. On February 27, Jesse Eisinger, journalist and author, discussed his new book, The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives, with Professor Paul Zarowin.
  5. ↑ Vanderbilt University (23 October 2017). "Jesse Eisinger: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives" . Retrieved 4 August 2025– via YouTube.
  6. ↑ Kwak, James. "Getting Away With It". Archived from the original on 2017-07-27. Retrieved 4 August 2025. THE CHICKENSHIT CLUB Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives By Jesse Eisinger 377 pp. Simon & Schuster. $28.
  7. ↑ The Harvard Law Forum (2 March 2018). "Combating Wall Street Lawlessness: Jesse Eisinger" . Retrieved 4 August 2025– via YouTube.
  8. ↑ "Around the Quads >> In Lumine Tuo". Columbia College Today. Columbia College. Fall 2011. Archived from the original on 2023-06-02. Retrieved May 26, 2017. 'In Lumine Tuo' translates to, In English, 'In Your Light'
  9. 1 2 3 "Jesse Eisinger (Bio)". Investopedia . Retrieved May 26, 2017.
  10. 1 2 3 "Jesse Eisinger Joins ProPublica's Reporting Team". ProPublica (press release). July 8, 2009. Retrieved August 24, 2018.
  11. 1 2 3 Kantrow, Yvette (26 October 2007). "Apocalypto". HuffPost Contributor platform. Retrieved 4 August 2025. Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal
  12. ↑ Roush, Chris (2015). "Why the media got it right". In Schifferes, Steven; Roberts, Richard (eds.). The media and financial crisis (PDF). London: Routledge. p. 25. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 January 2024. Retrieved 4 August 2025.
  13. ↑ Eisinger, Jesse (November 2007). "Wall Street Requiem". Portfolio.com Condé Nast Portfolio . Archived from the original on 2007-10-18. Retrieved 4 August 2025.
  14. 1 2 "The Wall Street Money Machine". ProPublica . 9 June 2014. Archived from the original on 2025-07-12. Retrieved 4 August 2025. 61 stories published since 2010
  15. ↑ Solomon, Sam (4 March 2025). "Eisinger warns of attacks on journalism in GSB event". The Stanford Daily . Retrieved 4 August 2025. Eisinger spoke with Hendrick Townley MBA '25 at 'Press Under Pressure: Compliance and the Cost of Truth', a discussion co-hosted by the Graduate School of Business' Corporation and Society Initiative (CASI).
  16. 1 2 Steiger, Paul (April 18, 2011). "A Note on ProPublica's Second Pulitzer Prize". ProPublica. Retrieved May 26, 2017.
  17. ↑ "jesse-eisinger-and-jake-bernstein". winners. www.pulitzer.org. Retrieved 4 August 2025.
  18. 1 2 3 "Jesse Eisinger". New America . Retrieved May 26, 2017.
  19. ↑ "UCLA Anderson School of Management Announces 2015 Gerald Loeb Award Winners". UCLA Anderson School of Management . June 24, 2015. Retrieved January 31, 2019.
  20. ↑ "Jesse Eisinger Joins ProPublica's Reporting Team". ProPublica. July 8, 2009.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.