Karen Miller Pensiero is a veteran news leader who has spent much of her career focused on upholding journalism standards and ethics.
Pensiero worked for over 38 years at The Wall Street Journal, which she left in 2023 after more than five years as managing editor. In that role, she was responsible for hiring, training, the budget, culture and support of the Journal’s more than 1,300 journalists in over 60 bureaus around the globe. From 2004 until 2017, she focused on working closely with journalists throughout the reporting process, “final reading” the hardest-hitting Journal articles, and teaching and weighing issues of standards, ethics and fairness globally as the newsroom’s standards editor.
Prior to that, she held a variety of positions throughout the Journal and its parent company, Dow Jones, including managing editor/international, overseeing the editing of the Journal’s Asian and European editions; Money & Markets editor of The Wall Street Journal Europe; director of corporate communications for Dow Jones; and director of Dow Jones Interactive Publishing International.
In addition to advising and working with New York University’s new Ethics & Journalism Initiative, she is also on a launch committee working group for the Maine Trust for Local News, part of the National Trust for Local News.
Pensiero serves on the boards of the Missourian Publishing Association, the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism CUNY Foundation in New York City and the Dow Jones News Fund. She has served as a juror for the Pulitzer Prize and the Ancil Payne Award for Ethics in Journalism. Pensiero was also a member of the Dow Jones Foundation Board and of the advisory board of The Press Forward, an organization formed in the wake of the #MeToo movement that was dedicated to safe, fair and sustainable media work environments.
She is a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism.