Norman Pearlstine joined The Carlyle Group in September, 2006. He is a Senior Advisor to the private equity firm’s telecommunications and media group, based in New York.

Prior to joining Carlyle, Pearlstine was a Senior Advisor to Time Warner Inc. from January 1, 2006. Before that, he served for 11 years as editor-in-chief of the company’s Time Inc. subsidiary. As editor-in-chief, the fifth in the company’s history, Pearlstine oversaw the editorial content of Time Inc.’s 154 magazines, including Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, In Style, Money, People, Real Simple, Sports Illustrated, and Time.

Prior to joining Time Inc., Pearlstine worked for The Wall Street Journal from 1968 to 1992, except for a two-year period, 1978-1980, when he was an executive editor of Forbes magazine. At the Journal, he served as a staff reporter in Dallas, Detroit and Los Angeles (1968-1973); Tokyo bureau chief (1973-1976); managing editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal (1976-1978); national editor (1980-1981); editor and publisher of The Wall Street Journal/Europe (1982-1983); managing editor (1983-1991); and executive editor (1991-1992).

After resigning from the Journal in June 1992, Pearlstine spent a year launching Smart Money magazine for the Journal’s parent, Dow Jones & Company, and for Hearst. He then became general partner of Friday Holdings L.P., a multimedia investment company, in April 1993 and held that position until joining Time Inc. in October 1994.

In January 2005, the American Society of Magazine Editors named Pearlstine the recipient of its Lifetime Achievement Award and inducted him into the Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame. He was honored with the Loeb Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism in 2000. He received the National Press Foundation’s Editor of the Year Award in 1989.

Pearlstine is President and CEO of The American Academy in Berlin and is President of the Atsuko Chiba Foundation, which provides scholarships to Asian journalists for study in the U.S. He also serves on the boards of the Carnegie Corporation, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the International Center for Journalists, the Arthur F. Burns Fellowship Program, the Berlin School of Creative Leadership at Steinbeis University and the Tribeca Film Institute. He serves on the advisory boards of the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University, the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California and the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Pearlstine received his B.A. from Haverford College, his L.L.B. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he did postgraduate work at the law school of Southern Methodist University. He is a member of the Bar Association of the District of Columbia.

Pearlstine is the author of, OFF THE RECORD: The Press, the Government, and the War over Anonymous Sources, for Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which was published in June 2007.

He is married to Jane Boon Pearlstine, Ph.D., a writer and researcher on technology and policy.

Show full bio

Hide full bio