The Media Wall of Fame
DePauw University and the PCCM annually honor alumni for their contributions to the Media.
Meg Kissinger Boynton '79
Meg Kissinger ‘79 writes about people who struggle with mental illness. She began her reporting at The DePauw on her first day on
campus, becoming editor in 1978. After interning for two Winter Terms at the Bluffton Evening News-Banner with the great Jim
Barbieri ‘50, she worked at the Watertown (NY) Daily Times, the Cincinnati Post and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
Her reporting honors include two George Polk Awards, two Scripps-Howard National reporting awards, Investigative Reporters and Editors, Sigma Delta Chi, and the Robert F. Kennedy National Journalism Award. Kissinger was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. She is proudest that her stories led to the creation of more than 1,000 supportive housing units for people in Milwaukee with mental illness.
Kissinger was the Pulliam Distinguished Visiting Professor at DePauw in 2015-2016. Since then, she has taught investigative reporting at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism as a visiting professor. Her memoir, While You Were Out, chronicles her family’s resilience after the suicides of a brother and sister.
Listen to her acceptance speech
David L. Chambers '73
David Chambers majored in Philosophy at DePauw, and loved that course of study and its faculty. David was also interested in writing, and taking advantage of how the university offered many opportunities to do different things, David composed a column that regularly ran in The DePauw newspaper when he was a sophomore, and again when he was a senior. Yet, the main focus of his extracurricular activities during his time in Greencastle was the theater, and he acted or directed virtually every semester and winter term during his four years.
In choosing a graduate school, he elected not to continue to pursue philosophy, and instead went to Indiana University where he earned an M. A. in theater directing. He then moved to Los Angeles, and after a short theater stint, turned again to writing, this time for television. Beginning with Bosom Buddies, the series that first made Tom Hanks famous, he went on to serve on the writing staff of fourteen different prime-time series, including Emmy-winning shows The Wonder Years, and Frank’s Place. David was also credited as a producer on many of those shows. With his wife, Julie, he continued to write for several other series, including The Simpsons. And when he wasn’t working in comedy, he managed to write a number of
documentaries for the History Channel.
David also became interested in helping with the education of young writers and started team-teaching with his wife. They taught for UCLA’s revered MFA screenwriting program and helped Syracuse University begin its Los Angeles Semester for undergraduates, creating and teaching the screenwriting class for the first ten years of that program, before retiring. They’ve been pleased to see that a number of their students have since embarked on their own careers in the highly competitive world of writing for television and film.
Since retiring, David has turned his attention to historical fiction, writing a book about the day Robert E. Lee surrendered to U. S. Grant at Appomattox. He is now working with his wife on a book about the disastrous Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in 1942, bearing out the truth of what they always told their students: “When you’re a writer, you have homework for the rest of your life”
Listen to his acceptance speech.
James B. Stewart '73
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author James B. Stewart combines the skills of an investigative reporter with the style of a novelist to examine the top stories in finance, politics, and law. The San Francisco Examiner called him “the journalist every journalist would like to be,” and The Daily Beast named him one of the 15 “most important writers on business and economics.”
Stewart is a captivating speaker with powerful insights on ethics and leadership, Wall Street, and corporate responsibility. Drawing from the last three decades of the U.S. business, legal, and political scenes, he brings both social and political context to the major events shaping American society.
Stewart’s New York Times column, “Common Sense,” appears weekly in the Business Day section. He provides skillful coverage of corporate America, often exploring the use and abuse of power at the highest levels of business and government. A former Wall Street Journal reporter and front-page editor, Stewart received two Gerald Loeb Awards, the George Polk Award for financial reporting, and a Pulitzer Prize with his deputy editor during his time at the paper.
He is the author of 12 books including his latest work, Deep State: Trump, the FBI, and the Rule of Law, which tells the dramatic saga of the FBI and its simultaneous investigations of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump – the first time in American history the FBI has been thrust into the middle of both parties’ campaigns for the Presidency.
Stewart’s New York Times bestseller, DisneyWar, about Michael Eisner’s reign at the company, won the Gerald Loeb Award for Best Business Book. Heart of a Soldier was named the “Best Book about 9/11” by TIME magazine. His other bestsellers include Blood Sport and Den of Thieves, the definitive account of 1980s Wall Street insider trading scandals, and was listed as one of the “Best books about Wall Street” by Yahoo Finance.
As a regular contributor to The New Yorker, Stewart has written penetrating profiles of Blackstone Group’s Stephen Schwarzman and Jérôme Kerviel, the rogue trader who lost billions of euros for Société Générale. His acclaimed cover story, “Eight Days: The Battle to Save the American Financial System,” captured behind-the-scenes dealings that prompted unprecedented government intervention following the collapse of Lehman Brothers.
Stewart ‘73 received his bachelor of arts in International Relations at DePauw University, where he also served as editor of The DePauw. A member and former chair of DePauw’s Board of Trustees, Stewart received the Old Gold Goblet from DePauw in 2009. In May 2012, Stewart was presented with DePauw’s Bernard C. Kilgore ‘29 Medal for Distinguished Lifetime Achievement in Journalism. A Harvard-educated lawyer, Stewart is the Bloomberg Professor of Business Journalism at the Columbia Journalism School. In 2011, the New York Financial Writers Association honored Stewart with the Elliott V. Bell Award for lifetime contributions to the field of financial journalism.
Listen to his acceptance speech.