The headline act

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Success: Amanda Bennett has spent her career at the pinnacle of US journalism, winning two Pulitzers in the process. She's now big at Bloomberg.

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Disgraced: Jayson Blair's mis-use of anonumous sources lost his his job.

For a woman who does not have time to sleep, Amanda Bennett is disarmingly charming. Her day starts early, very early. An executive editor at newswire Bloomberg, she knows that the world's news waits for no man. And it certainly doesn't need to wait for this Pulitzer prize winning investigative journalist: "I looked at the New York Times at 5.30 this morning," she tells Arabian Business, "and I already knew pretty much everything that was in it in terms of the news."

Bennett is head of Enterprise at Bloomberg, one of the world's most well-known business and financial news providers alongside Reuters and Dow Jones, and is due to speak at the Arabian Business media & marketing conference in Dubai on November 12. The softly spoken journalist is responsible for overseeing Bloomberg's interpretive, analytical and investigative reporting. "It's what I've done a lot of in my life," she explains, modestly.

Bennett's stellar career is enough to inspire envy in any aspiring journalist. And it is one that has taught her the true value of her profession. So rich and rewarding has it been that no single experience stands out: "it's been lots and lots of really wonderful periods, for all different reasons."

A newspaper intern through college, Bennett "wound up" in Canada working for a paper in Ottawa, when her student days were over. After two months, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) pounced, snapping up the future multi-Pulitzer prize-winning journalist. "It was not quite my first job out of college but only by a couple of months," she explains, adding nonchalantly, "and so I worked there for 23 years."

Bennett left the WSJ having travelled the world with one of the best known newspapers in the journalism industry.

She then moved on to the Oregonian, one of the oldest continuously published newspapers on America's West Coast, and a paper firmly rooted in its local community. In stark contrast to her experiences at the WSJ, the Oregonian taught Bennett how important a newspaper really is to its local community.

This was a lesson that was continued when she moved to edit the Herald-Leader in the relatively small community of Lexington, Kentucky. "It was my own paper, a small paper," she explains, "and it was really integrated with its own community."

Even Bennett's difficult days at the Philadelphia Inquirer were rewarding. "It's going to sounds strange," she warns, but the experience of having led a newspaper through such a difficult time was something of a privilege."

Despite making history as the first woman to head the newspaper, she joined at a time of financial hardship and deep unrest. Disgruntled employees were rallying against company-wide layoffs, and only a few months after she had started, the paper's publisher quit.

But Bennett carried on learning from her experiences. She explains: "it made me very aware of the value of what we do but also the stresses that the industry is facing."

The Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the first newspapers to deal with the financial strain that many publications in the industry are now negotiating. As executive editor, Bennett was forced to re-evaluate not only the whole newspaper, but the ideals of the journalism that underpinned it. "We had to spend a lot of time thinking about what was valuable about what we do, what were going to offer our readers, how we were going to do it and how we were going to be creative and flexible and really focus on what was important," she tells Arabian Business. Ultimately it became clear that, "you couldn't do everything anymore."

From the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bennett moved to her current position at Bloomberg. A move that saw her reunited with friend and former workmate, Matt Winkler. Winkler set up Bloomberg in 1981 and was an old colleague of Bennett's at the WSJ. His days at the Journal informed much of Bloomberg's early development. The newswire is now among the most respected sources of financial news in the world. For Bennett it represents the "best of both worlds. " It is built on the foundations of the practices of one of the best newspapers in the US. But at the sametime, she says, it was only created 17 years ago so it's got the advantage of being new. You can say OK from now on we're going to do it this way. You can start from the beginning."

Despite the financial difficulties that face the industry, Bennett has consistently endeavoured to raise the standard of journalism wherever she has worked, ensuring that her performance and that of her journalists represents the pinnacle of professional excellence. "There's a whole range of things that go into a paper's credibility that you have to do every day," she says, and "there are all different kinds of ways you can raise the standard of journalism."

For Bennett, one of the most important qualities that a journalist can attain is credibility - a professional integrity that allows readers to believe you.

"That's one thing that we took for granted at the WSJ," she admits. With a history of "decades of credibility" behind it the paper is known for its accurate and informed journalism. Following the tragic loss of its South Asia bureau chief Daniel Pearl, in February 2002, the WSJ has also become better known for its brave investigative reporting. Pearl was kidnapped and killed in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been researching the story of British-born terrorist Richard Reid, and alleged links to Al Qaeda.

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