Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Dean Starkman to talk about media coverage of financial sector

Dean Starkman, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, media critic and author, will speak at Yale on Monday, Dec. 7 as a Poynter Fellow in Journalism.

During his visit, Starkman will participate in two campus events. The first, a lunchtime discussion on the topic “Why the Financial Sector Keeps Taking the Public and Press by Surprise,” will take place in Yale’s School of Management, 165 Whitney Ave., from noon to 1:15 p.m. The second, a master’s tea titled “Journalism’s Crisis — and the Public’s,” will take place in the Jonathan Edwards College master’s house, 68 High St., at 4 p.m. Both events are free and open to the public.

An investigative reporter for more than two decades, Starkman has covered white-collar crime and securities law for the Wall Street Journal and helped lead the Providence Journal’s investigative team to a Pulitzer Prize for a series of stories on crimes and cover-ups in the Rhode Island state court system.

Starkman is the New York-based Wall Street reporter for the Los Angeles Times, covering the intersection of finance and society, with a focus on issues affecting California. This month, he will move to the School of Public Policy of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, where he is a fellow at its Center for Media, Data, and Society. He will teach about media and public-interest journalism and participate in a project to create training and support program for embattled independent media in Central Europe and the Balkans. In 2014, he published “The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: the Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism,” a wide-ranging critique of the American media’s coverage of Wall Street and mortgage lenders in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008. He is lead editor of “The Best Business Writing” book anthology series, published by Columbia University Press.

Starkman was a longtime editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, where he ran the business-media section called “The Audit.”  He is a former Wall Street Journal staff writer; there he covered white-collar crime and securities law, among other things. His work has appeared in the Nation, The New Republic, Washington Monthly, Mother Jones, and elsewhere.

The Poynter Fellowship in Journalism was established by Nelson Poynter, who received his master’s degree in 1927 from Yale. The fellowship brings to campus journalists from a wide variety of media outlets who have made significant contributions to their field. Among recent Poynter fellows are Deborah Solomon, Molly Crabapple, and David Remnick.