Karen Toulon, a Role Model for Newsroom Achievement and Diversity, Honored by Her Peers as a Business News Visionary

DENVER, Aug. 17, 2020 /PRNewswire/ -- Karen Toulon, who has spent much of her two-decade-plus career at Bloomberg News working behind the scenes, has been named a 2020 Business News Visionary.

The distinction is bestowed on an elite group of journalists whose dedication, foresight, and talents have had a transformative impact on the profession. Toulon's oral history and profile are available at www.NewsLuminaries.com and will be featured in a commemorative book to be published in 2021.

"Karen has led by example, helping Bloomberg News' diverse global journalists establish a cohesive identity and encouraging team members to realize their full potential," said Dean Rotbart, chair and editor-in-chief of the Business News Visionary Awards.

After eight years as the team leader overseeing Bloomberg's newsmaker and broadcast interviews, in 2007, Toulon was named chief of the New York bureau, home to more than 700 journalists.

"In that capacity, and all her subsequent roles, Karen has demonstrated through her accomplishments that journalists and their newsroom colleagues will rise to meet a wide variety of career challenges, if they believe in themselves and if others will believe in them," he added.

Earlier this summer, Toulon assumed her current position as a senior writer on Bloomberg's global, cross-platform team that explores inequality in all its forms.

"The whole notion of role modeling is something I take very seriously," Toulon explains in her oral history, acknowledging that she considers herself a representative for her gender, race, and "a profession that I continue to adore."

The Business News Visionary Awards are a continuation of the Business News Luminary Awards, which, in 2000, honored the 100 top business and financial journalists of the 20th century.

"The goal of this project extends beyond the celebration of the specific men and women who are profiled," notes Terri Thompson, who introduces each journalist's oral history.

"It is also to educate the public about the high standards to which these and so many other dedicated journalists have adhered and to offer a proven playbook for other journalists and journalism students to follow," she says. Thompson is the former director of the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism at Columbia University.

Rotbart is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated, award-winning financial journalist, former columnist with The Wall Street Journal, author, and a news entrepreneur. He, along with a panel of more than two dozen distinguished nominating judges – including past award recipients and top business news organization editors and reporters – is responsible for selecting the 2020 class of honorees.

Other 2020 Business News Visionary oral histories now available at www.NewsLuminaries.com include Stephen J. Adler, Reuters; Maria Bartiromo and Neil Cavuto, FOX Business Network; Susan Antilla, author and investigative reporter; Henry Dubroff, Pacific Coast Business Times; Nina Easton, Fortune Global Forum; and Matthew Quayle, CNBC.

Future oral histories will include Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times and CNBC; Randall Lane and Kerry A. Dolan, Forbes; Adi Ignatius, Harvard Business Review; Joanne Lipman, author and editor; Pattie Sellers, Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, and Sarah Bartlett, dean of the School of Journalism at City University of New York.

The Business News Visionary and News Luminary Awards are made possible, in part, by the support of Monday Morning Radio, a weekly podcast produced in cooperation with the nonprofit Wizard Academy and its founders, Roy H. and Pennie Williams; and Robert L. Dilenschneider and Joan Avagliano of The Dilenschneider Group, providing an unsurpassed level of communications counsel to global clients.

Additional support is provided by TimeinaBottlePhotography.com and its founder, Avital Rotbart, specializing in world-class portrait photography.

Media contact:
Dean Rotbart
[email protected] 
303-296-1200

SOURCE NewsLuminaries.com