The Business and Economic Reporting Program has named two leading business journalists as visiting scholars: Bethany McLean, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and columnist for Reuters who co-authored of "The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron"; and Leigh Gallagher, assistant managing editor at Fortune.

The Business and Economic Reporting Program at NYU

The Business and Economic Reporting Program at New York University has named two leading business journalists as visiting scholars: Bethany McLean, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and columnist for Reuters who co-authored of The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron; and Leigh Gallagher, assistant managing editor at Fortune and co-chair of the Fortune Most Powerful Women/State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership.

The visiting scholar program at NYU’s Business and Economic Reporting Program brings leading thinkers to campus to enrich the academic lives of students by participating in seminars, delivering lectures, consulting with faculty, and mentoring students. In exchange, scholars receive access to NYU’s Bobst Library as well as the university’s research databases. McLean and Gallagher will continue in their current media posts while providing guidance to the program’s masters students.

McLean graduated from Williams College in 1992 with a double major in math and English, then spent the next three years working as an investment banking analyst at Goldman Sachs. In 1995, she joined Fortune magazine as a reporter, and eventually became an editor-at-large. Her 2001 piece, "Is Enron Overpriced?" was one of the first skeptical articles about Enron, and after the company collapsed into bankruptcy, she co-authored The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, with Fortune colleague Peter Elkind. A documentary based on the book was nominated for an Academy Award in 2006. In 2008, McLean joined Vanity Fair as a contributing editor. Her recent book, which she co-authored with New York Times columnist Joe Nocera, is All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis. She is also a columnist for Reuters and a contributor at CNBC.

Gallagher is an assistant managing editor at Fortune magazine, where she edits feature stories on a variety of subjects and has responsibility for Fortune editorial franchises, including the “Best Companies to Work For,” the “40 Under 40” ranking of the most powerful young people in business, and Fortune’s lifestyle coverage. Gallagher is a seasoned business news commentator, appearing regularly on television outlets, including CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, NBC, CBS, and Fox News, and is a contracted biweekly guest on American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” A frequent speaker at Fortune and other business and economics conferences, she serves as co-chair of the Fortune Most Powerful Women/State Department Global Women’s Mentoring Partnership. Gallagher is currently at work on a book about the future of the suburbs to be published by Portfolio in early 2013. Before joining Fortune in 2007, Gallagher was a senior editor at SmartMoney, where she edited the magazine’s consumer-oriented coverage, and worked for six years as a writer and reporter for Forbes. She is a graduate of Cornell University and lives in New York.

Editor’s Note:
NYU’s Business and Economic Reporting (BER) Program, which is part of NYU’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, is an interdisciplinary program that educates graduate students to write about important issues in economics and finance. Students take half of their courses in the Carter Journalism Institute and the other half in the MBA program at NYU’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business. Students have gone on to reporting jobs at major news organizations such as the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, Dow Jones Newswires, Reuters, and Bloomberg. To learn more, click here.

For more information, contact Professor Stephen D. Solomon, BER director, at sds1@nyu.edu, or Adam L. Penenberg, BER assistant director at adam.penenberg@nyu.edu.

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