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St. Olaf alum Gretchen Morgenson wins Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting at the New York Times

By Amy Gage
April 9, 2002

NORTHFIELD, MINN. - Gretchen Morgenson, a 1976 graduate of St. Olaf College, was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for beat reporting for her "trenchant and incisive Wall Street coverage," the Pulitzer Prize Board announced April 8.

A business and financial editor at the New York Times, Morgenson competed against finalists from the Boston Globe and USA Today. She will be awarded $7,500.

The Times also was cited in the Pulitzer "public service" category for "A Nation Challenged," a special section on the events and aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attack published regularly throughout the rest of 2001. Along with Carla Baranauckas, a 1977 St. Olaf graduate who grew up in Edina, Minn., Morgenson contributed to the section's "Portraits of Grief" feature, which profiled victims of the attack and will be published as a book later this year.

Morgenson graduated from the Paracollege at St. Olaf at age 20 with a bachelor of arts degree in English and history with a concentration in journalism. In her comments to the newsroom April 8 she said she had dreamed of working at the New York Times since college, Baranauckas said.

Prior to joining the Times in 1998, Morgenson was assistant managing editor at Forbes magazine. She also has worked as an editor or staff writer at Worth magazine, Money magazine and Vogue, where she was a financial columnist.

In addition to the Pulitizer, Morgenson, 46, has won awards for personal finance reporting and for deadline reporting on the financial markets. Her book Forbes Great Minds of Business was published in 1997.

Morgenson credits St. Olaf English Professor David Wee with teaching her essential writing skills. "I really feel like he taught me how to write - how to make things interesting and lively and structure them so they're linear. His freshman English class was a tough course," she said. "He was an old-school professor."

Morgenson comes from a long line of St. Olaf graduates, including her mother, Rebecca, class of 1951, a former librarian at Miami University, and her father, Don, class of 1950, who teaches psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario. She graduated from high school in Oxford, Ohio.

Baranauckas studied English at St. Olaf and edited the student newspaper, the Manitou Messenger. Currently she is the assistant to the editor on the continuous news desk at the New York Times.

St. Olaf College, a national leader among liberal arts institutions, fosters the development of mind, body and spirit. It is a residential college located in Northfield, Minn., and affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA). The college provides personalized instruction and diverse learning environments, with more than two-thirds of its students participating in international studies. For more information, see www.stolaf.edu.

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.