Stephen J. Adler

Stephen J. Adler (born 1955) is an American journalist. He has been editor-in-chief of Reuters since 2011 and president since 2012.

Stephen Adler was born in 1955. His father, Norman, was a high school English department chairman, and his mother, Mildred, was a writer and social worker. He graduated from Harvard University in 1977 and from Harvard Law School in 1983.

He began his career as a reporter for Tampa Times and Tallahassee Democrat. He joined The American Lawyer in 1983, then in 1988 joined The Wall Street Journal as legal editor. He was promoted to assistant managing editor in 1998 and to deputy managing editor in 2000.

He was editor-in-chief of BusinessWeek from 2005 to 2009. During his five-year tenure, the magazine and its website won more than 100 awards.

He joined Thomson Reuters in 2010 as senior vice president and editorial director of the company’s Professional Division. He was named editor-in-chief of Reuters News and an executive vice president for Thomson Reuters in 2011, where he directed the editorial operations and news strategy for the company. Adler was named president and editor-in-chief of Reuters in December 2012. In 2018, he spoke out against the arrest and conviction of two Reuters journalists in Myanmar.

Adler serves on the boards of the Thomson Reuters Foundation and the Columbia Journalism Review. He is also on the boards of the International Media Council of the World Economic Forum, the Committee to Protect Journalists, and the Council on Foreign Relations, and is on the Gerald Loeb Award's board of final judges.

Publications

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 Letters of the Century: America 1900—1999 and Women’s Letters: America from the Revolutionary War to the Present. They also co-authored The Marriage Book.