Visiting professor Karen Blumenthal, a financial journalist for more than 25 years, is on campus this semester to teach classes in the Schieffer School. Her time here is made possible by a grant from the Donald W. Reynolds Foundation.

 

The five-year program, announced last fall, will ultimately create 11 visiting professorships at 11 different schools. It is administered through the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.

 

The Schieffer School is among the first four schools to have a visiting professor.

 

Blumenthal writes the "Getting Going" personal finance column for The Wall Street Journal. As a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, she has covered retailing, technology, oil and gas, housing, mergers, and bankruptcies. She served as business editor of The Dallas Morning News from 1992 to 1994 and then returned to the Journal.

 

She was WSJ Dallas bureau chief for eight years, supervising a dozen reporters in an eight-state territory, responsible for national coverage of oil and gas and regional coverage of several industries, including technology, retail and airlines. In that role, she coordinated and edited one of the Sept. 11, 2001, page one stories that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for spot-news reporting.

 

Karen has written three financial books for adults, including Grande Expectations: A Year in the Life of Starbucks’ Stock, which Kiplinger magazine named one of the best investing reads of 2007. She is also the award-winning author of four nonfiction books for young people on subjects ranging from sports to Prohibition. A fifth book for young people, a biography of Steve Jobs, is to be published this spring.

 

As an author and reporter, she has appeared on the ABC World News Tonight, the Today Show, CNN and the PBS Nightly Business Report.