Barlett & Steele Judges

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ALIX M. FREEDMAN

Alix Freedman is a deputy managing editor for The Wall Street Journal, charged with spurring the Journal’s efforts to maintain and extend the paper’s unparalleled reputation for accuracy and fairness. She also oversees the final reading of Page One and other high-profile stories, and assures that complaints about Journal content are met with prompt and thorough responses. Prior to assuming her current position in December 2005, she was an assistant managing editor, beginning in December 2004.  Freedman was a senior editor from 2002 to 2004. Before that, she was the Journal's investigative projects editor from 1999 to 2002.   

Freedman joined the Philadelphia bureau of the Journal as a reporter in June 1984. She moved to the New York bureau in 1987, covering the food and tobacco industry and was promoted to senior special writer, doing investigative reporting in July 1991.

In 1996, Freedman won a Pulitzer Prize in the national affairs category for her coverage of the tobacco industry, including a report that exposed how ammonia additives heighten nicotine potency.

In December 2003, New York Women in Communications, Inc., named Freedman winner of their 2004 Matrix Award in the newspaper category.

In 2002, Freedman and Journal colleague Steve Stecklow were nominated finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in the international reporting category for their reports revealing little-known ways that Saddam Hussein profited from the United Nations sanctions meant to punish him.

In 1999, Freedman won the George Polk Award for excellence in journalism in international reporting for her page-one story “Population Bomb.” The story was an account of how two American contraceptive researchers arranged for chemical sterilization of more than 100,000 women in developing nations, using quinacrine, the potentially carcinogenic contraceptive. Also in 1999, Freedman was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for “Population Bomb.”   

Freedman has received two Gerald Loeb Awards. In 1998, she and another Journal reporter won in the deadline category for their coverage of the tobacco industry's liability settlement, and in 1993, she won in the large newspaper category for "Fire Power," an examination of how a secretive, Southern California family dominated the market for low-priced handguns frequently used in crimes. She was a 1994 Gerald Loeb finalist in the large newspaper category for her investigative article "Peddling Dreams."  

Prior to joining the Journal, Freedman worked as a news assistant for The New York Times and as a staff reporter for BusinessWeek magazine.

Freedman is a graduate of Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in history and literature. 

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STEPHEN KOEPP

As FORTUNE Executive Editor, Stephen Koepp supervises many print and online features including special issues such as FORTUNE 500 and America’s Most Admired Companies. Koepp arrived at FORTUNE in January 2007 from its sister publication TIME, where as Deputy Managing Editor he oversaw a restructuring and redesign of TIME.com, the magazine's website, in 2005-06. During that time, the site's monthly unique visitors grew by nearly 90%, to 4.1 million, and TIME.com won the "Website of the Year" award for 2006 in the business & news category from the Magazine Publishers of America.

As an editor at TIME, Koepp developed two of the magazine's bestselling franchises: Time’s annual cover story on American history, which began with an issue on Lewis & Clark, and the annual Mind & Body issue, which anticipated the growing interest in alternative approaches to health care. Koepp also created the magazine's 80th anniversary special, called "80 Days That Changed the World," which later became a book, and top-edited the inaugural edition of its annual "TIME 100" issue on the world's most influential people. He also edited the work of investigative reporters Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele, whose series on Money & Politics won a National Magazine Award in 2001 in the public interest category.

Koepp, a Wisconsin native, received a B.A. degree (journalism major, German minor) from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in 1978. After graduation he joined the Waukesha Freeman, a daily newspaper in Wisconsin, where he worked as a reporter and editor. He joined TIME as a correspondent in the magazine's Letters department, became a reporter in the business section later in the year and was promoted to staff writer in 1983 and senior editor in 1988. He wrote and edited cover stories on Ralph Lauren, the Walt Disney company, the buyout of RJR-Nabisco, the Simple Life, the Church of Scientology and the B.C.C.I. banking scandal. As editor of the Nation section and later its top editor, Koepp supervised coverage of the Clinton Administration, the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, and the 2000 Presidential election.

With his brother David, he also co-wrote the 1994 motion picture The Paper. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife Lesley Alderman and two sons.

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JIM NAUGHTON

Jim Naughton retired in September 2003 after seven years as president of The Poynter Institute.

Previously, he was executive editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer. In 18 years at the newspaper, he also served as national/international news editor, metro editor, associate managing editor, deputy managing editor and managing editor. The newspaper was awarded 10 Pulitzer Prizes for journalism done under his direction.

From 1969 to 1977, Jim was a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times. He covered urban affairs, Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, the Nixon White House, the 1972 presidential candidacies of Edmund Muskie and George McGovern, Congress, the Senate Watergate Hearings, the House of Representatives Inquiry into the Impeachment of President Nixon, the Ford White House and the 1976 Republican candidacy of Gerald Ford. This made him, in effect, the Times' expert on losers.

From 1962 to 1969, he was a police, rewrite, federal, city hall, politics and state legislative reporter for The Cleveland Plain Dealer. He worked as a police reporter for WGAR radio during a four-month newspaper strike. Jim's love affair with newsgathering began his junior year in high school at The Painesville (Ohio) Telegraph; despite working there each summer from 1955 through 1960 as reporter, photographer, editor, editorial writer, copy editor and proofreader, he professes no culpability in its untimely death.

He was born (in 1938) in Pittsburgh, raised in Cleveland and graduated cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1960. He served, with no discernible increase in hostilities, as an officer of the U.S. Marines from 1960 to 1962.  He and Diana Naughton, parents of four children and two grandsons, now live -- get this -- on Coffee Pot Boulevard in St. Petersburg. 

Jim was the recipient of a Sigma Delta Chi award for national correspondence in 1973 for writing of the fall of Spiro Agnew and a Press Club of Cleveland award for politics reporting in 1967 for writing about the rise of Mayor Carl Stokes. He was a visiting Marsh Professor of Journalism in 1977 and 1985 at the University of Michigan.

He was the only newspaper editor in America who had a chicken machine in his office, perhaps because his most notorious moment as a journalist could have been when he wore a chicken head to a President Ford news conference in 1976.

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