Departments
Journalism
Education
- M.A., Harvard University
- B.A. Yale University
Research Focus
- The Changing State of the News Media
- China
- Race and Class in America
- African American-Jewish relations
Courses Taught
- Interpreting the News
- Covering the Campaign
- Covering Race and Class
Jonathan Kaufman, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, editor, and author, joined Northeastern University in 2015 as Professor and Director in the School of Journalism. Prior to joining Northeastern, he held senior positions at Bloomberg News, The Wall Street Journal and The Boston Globe. As Bloomberg’s Executive Editor for Company News, based in New York, Kaufman oversaw more than 300 reporters and editors worldwide covering business, health, science, education, and international news. Under his leadership, Kaufman’s team at Bloomberg won numerous awards including a 2015 Pulitzer Prize, several George Polk Awards, the Overseas Press Club Award, a Gerald Loeb Award, the Osborn Elliott Prize of the Asia Society, and the Education Writers Association Grand Prize.
As the Director of Northeastern University’s School of Journalism, Professor Kaufman has led an accomplished team of faculty and has provided oversight for the School’s undergraduate program, as well as its growing graduate programs in Journalism, Media Innovation and Media Advocacy. Under his direction, the School of Journalism more than quadrupled its graduate enrollment and launched the Media Advocacy program in cooperation with the School of Law. It has hired three new tenured-track faculty to expand its expertise in public relations, digital media, and data, and added non-tenure track faculty with award-winning expertise in video, investigative reporting and data storytelling. In recent years, the School has secured almost $1 million in external funding to support programs and research and it has built interdisciplinary offerings to expand learning and research opportunities for students. Graduates of the School in recent years have gone on to jobs at The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Pro Publica, CNBC, Business Insider, NPR stations in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and New Hampshire, and jobs in Massachusetts state government and at leading communications firms.
Before joining Bloomberg, Kaufman was deputy Page One editor at The Wall Street Journal and also served as The Wall Street Journal’s China Bureau Chief, based in Beijing. He began his journalism career at The Boston Globe in the early 1980s, where he won a Pulitzer Prize as part of a team examining racism and job discrimination in Boston. He also served as Berlin Bureau Chief of The Boston Globe.
Kaufman is the author of The Last Kings of Shanghai (Viking), a history of two families – the Sassoons and the Kadoories – who stood astride Chinese business and politics for the past 150 years and have shaped the rise of modern China. He is also the author of A Hole in the Heart of the World: Being Jewish in Eastern Europe and Broken Alliance: The Turbulent Times Between Blacks and Jews in America, which won the National Jewish Book Award. He received his BA in English from Yale University and an MA in Regional Studies–East Asia from Harvard University.
