Stephen J. Adler (born 1955) is the President and Editor-in-Chief of Reuters where he is responsible for the team that produces and markets Reuters news and commentary worldwide.
He joined Thomson Reuters in 2010 as Senior Vice President and Editorial Director of the company’s Professional Division. In this role, Adler built and directed news operations to deliver original journalism and relevant Reuters content to the millions of subscribers who rely on the company’s business units for information products and services. He was named Editor-in-Chief, Reuters News and Executive Vice President News, Thomson Reuters in 2011, where he directed the editorial operations and news strategy for the company. Adler was named President and Editor-in-Chief, Reuters in December 2012. Under Adler’s leadership, Reuters has received scores of top journalism awards around the world, including Reuters first-ever Pulitzer Prize for text reporting in 2014.
Before joining Thomson Reuters, Adler was Editor-in-Chief of BusinessWeek from 2005 to 2009, where, during his five-year tenure, the magazine and its website won more than 100 major journalism awards. Earlier, he spent sixteen years at The Wall Street Journal. As Investigative Editor there, Adler managed reporting teams that won three Pulitzer Prizes between 1995 and 1999. As Deputy Managing Editor, he oversaw the award-winning Wall Street Journal Online, created The Wall Street Journal Books imprint, and co-taught the ethics and standards course required for all news employees. Previously he was Editor of The American Lawyer. He began his career as a reporter at local newspapers in Florida, including The Tampa Times.
Adler serves on the boards of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Columbia Journalism Review. He is also a member of the International Media Council of the World Economic Forum; the Committee to Protect Journalists board of directors; the Council on Foreign Relations; and the Gerald R. Loeb Awards board of final judges.
Adler is author of the book The Jury: Trial and Error in the American Courtroom, which won the Silver Gavel Award from the American Bar Association. With his wife, novelist Lisa Grunwald, he was co-editor of the best-selling Letters of the Century: America 1900—1999 and Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present. They are working on a third anthology about marriage through the centuries.