—Systemic change begins with personal change—
Jesse Eisinger is a senior editor and reporter at ProPublica. He is the author of the “The Chickenshit Club: Why the Justice Department Fails to Prosecute Executives.â€
In April 2011, he and a colleague won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for a series of stories on questionable Wall Street practices that helped make the financial crisis the worst since the Great Depression. He won the 2015 Gerald Loeb Award for commentary. He has also twice been a finalist for the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting.
He serves on the advisory board of the University of California, Berkeley’s Financial Fraud Institute. And he was a consultant on season three of the HBO series “Succession.â€
He was a regular columnist for The New York Times’s Dealbook section. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, NewYorker.com, The Washington Post, The Baffler, The American Prospect and on NPR and “This American Life.†Before joining ProPublica, he was the Wall Street Editor of Conde Nast Portfolio and a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, covering markets and finance.
How do you become one of the premier investigative journalists at one of the premier publishers of investigative journalism? In general, how do you excel in an area with no established path? I consider figuring out how essential in leading others. I feel sad when I hear people say, "I'd like to help the environment, but there are no jobs in it." Of course not! When culture is the problem, following others won't solve it. Leading others requires leading yourself first. Jesse and I have known each other since college in the 1980s, so he shares his path from the start. On the surface, you'll hear him describe his failures, yet he kept rising to more responsibilities. Listen between the lines to hear what prompted the rise. I heard integrity, passion, persistence, vision, and intangibles that don't show up on resumes, but lead to success. What do you hear? After his personal story, Jesse shares his take of American values and culture and how it's changed in his professional lifetime. He hints at what he's working on next.