Louis Gordon Crovitz is an American media executive and advisor to media and technology companies. He is a former publisher of ''

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' is an American business-focused, international daily newspaper based in New York City, with international editions also available in Chinese and Japanese. The ''Journal'', along with its Asian editions, is published ...

'' who also served as executive vice-president of

Dow Jones Dow Jones is a combination of the names of business partners Charles Dow and Edward Jones. Dow Jones & Company Dow, Jones and Charles Bergstresser founded Dow Jones & Company in 1882. That company eventually became a subsidiary of News Corp, and ...

and launched the company's Consumer Media Group, which under his leadership integrated the global print, online, digital, TV and other editions of ''The Wall Street Journal'', MarketWatch.com and Barron's across news, advertising, marketing and other functions. He stepped down from those positions in December 2007, when News Corp. completed its acquisition of Dow Jones. He writes a weekly column in The Wall Street Journal, titled "Information Age."

Biography

Crovitz is a

Phi Beta Kappa The Phi Beta Kappa Society () is the oldest academic honor society in the United States, and the most prestigious, due in part to its long history and academic selectivity. Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal a ...

graduate of the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chicago is consistently ranked among the b ...

. He received a law degree as a

Rhodes Scholar The Rhodes Scholarship is an international postgraduate award for students to study at the University of Oxford, in the United Kingdom. Established in 1902, it is the oldest graduate scholarship in the world. It is considered among the world' ...

from

Wadham College Wadham College () is one of the constituent colleges of the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. It is located in the centre of Oxford, at the intersection of Broad Street and Parks Road. Wadham College was founded in 1610 by Dorothy W ...

Oxford University Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

and later a law degree from

Yale Law School Yale Law School (Yale Law or YLS) is the law school of Yale University, a Private university, private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. It was established in 1824 and has been ranked as the best law school in the United States by ''U ...

. In 1981, he started working as an editorial writer for

. The following year he became the founding editorial page editor for

The Wall Street Journal Europe ''The Wall Street Journal Europe'' was a daily English-language newspaper that covered global and regional business news for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). Published by Dow Jones & Company (a News Corp company), it formed part of th ...

, based in Brussels. In 1986 he was appointed to The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. He earned a

Gerald Loeb Award The Gerald Loeb Award, also referred to as the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, is a recognition of excellence in journalism, especially in the fields of business, finance and the economy. The award was estab ...

Honorable Mention for Commentary and the 1990 Gerald Loeb Award for Commentary. In 1992 he became the publisher for the

's Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong and in 1996 was named the managing director for Dow Jones Telerate's Asia/Pacific region as well as chairman of Dow Jones in Asia. In 1997-98 he was named vice president of planning and development for Dow Jones.Alt URL
/ref> Since leaving Dow Jones, he has co-founded and sold a start-up technology company and has become a director and advisor to several companies, including technology-based media companies. He is a co-founder of Journalism Online, whose Press+ service enables news publishers to generate subscription revenues for their content on web sites and through tablets, e-readers and mobile devices. Journalism Online, founded in 2009, was sold to

RR Donnelley R.R. Donnelley is an American Fortune 500 integrated communications company that provides marketing and business communications, commercial printing, and related services. Its corporate headquarters are located in Chicago, Illinois, United State ...

in 2011 for a reported $45 million. Google had launched a product in 2011 to compete with Press+, called Google One Pass, but shut the service down in April, 2012, with Press+ agreeing to grandfather its former customers. Crovitz was an early investor in

Business Insider ''Insider'', previously named ''Business Insider'' (''BI''), is an American financial and business news website founded in 2007. Since 2015, a majority stake in ''Business Insider''s parent company Insider Inc. has been owned by the German publ ...

. While at Dow Jones, he led the redesign of ''The Wall Street Journal'' in January 2007, repositioning the print edition to focus on "what the news means," with the web edition addressing "what's happening right now," with the aim of rethinking what a newspaper should be in the Digital Age. He turned around the financial performance of the ''Journal'' to become strongly profitable after earlier losing money. He also led the creation of the online news service

Factiva Factiva is a business information and research tool owned by Dow Jones & Company. Factiva aggregates content from both licensed and free sources. Providing organizations with search, alerting, dissemination, and other information management ...

, which he chaired for several years, and initiated the acquisition of publicly traded

MarketWatch MarketWatch is a website that provides financial information, business news, analysis, and stock market data. Along with ''The Wall Street Journal'' and ''Barron's'', it is a subsidiary of Dow Jones & Company, a property of News Corp. Histor ...

as well as specialist services Private Equity Analyst, VentureOne and VentureWire, London-based news franchise eFinancial News and Frankfurt-based newswire VWD. He oversaw the growth of ''The Wall Street Journal'' Online to the world's largest paid subscription news web site, with over one million paying subscribers at the end of 2007. Earlier in his career at Dow Jones, he served as the corporate vice president for planning and strategy; in 1998, he helped sell the Telerate division and helped craft a three-year plan for the company focused on growing Internet revenues. He was editor and publisher of the Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong, doubling revenues and aged 22 years, was founding editorial page editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe in Brussels. In March 2018, Gordon Crovitz and Steven Brill, partnered to form a new for-profit company, ''

NewsGuard NewsGuard is a journalism and technology tool that rates the credibility of news and information websites and tracks online misinformation. It operates a browser extension and mobile apps for consumers as well as services for businesses, includ ...

'', which claims to fight "fake news" by providing reliability ratings for over 7,500 U.S. websites to help online readers distinguish between legitimate news sources and those allegedly designed to spread misinformation. NewsGuard was launched on August 23, 2018. He married Anne Alstott (a professor at Yale Law School) on December 7, 1986. He is married to

Minky Worden Minky Worden is an American human rights advocate and author. She serves as Director of Global Initiatives at Human Rights Watch. She has been an adjunct associate professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs sin ...

, media director for

Human Rights Watch Human Rights Watch (HRW) is an international non-governmental organization, headquartered in New York City, that conducts research and advocacy on human rights. The group pressures governments, policy makers, companies, and individual human r ...

; they have three sons. Crovitz has written many controversial editorials. In July 2012, he argued that Xerox-Parc's development of the Ethernet protocol meant that the private sector, not the government, created the Internet. Crovitz cited a book by

Michael Hiltzik Michael A. Hiltzik (born November 9, 1952) is an American columnist, reporter and author who has written extensively for the ''Los Angeles Times''. In 1999, he won a beat reporting Pulitzer Prize for co-writing a series of articles about Corporat ...

to support this argument but Hiltzik himself rebutted the claim. Crovitz's claims were also rejected as "revisionist" by

Vint Cerf Vinton Gray Cerf (; born June 23, 1943) is an American Internet pioneer and is recognized as one of " the fathers of the Internet", sharing this title with TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn. He has received honorary degrees and awards that include t ...

, co-inventor of the

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

networking protocols that laid the foundations for the modern internet.

Biography

Notes

External links