Paul Steiger is the executive chairman of ProPublica, a non-profit newsroom that does investigative journalism in the public interest. He was elected as a Knight Foundation trustee in June 2006.

He is a member of the Governance, Nominating, and Program committees.

Steiger was the managing editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1991 to 2007, working with a newsroom staff that won 16 Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. From 2008 through 2012 he was the founding editor-in-chief, president, and ceo of ProPublica, whose staff was awarded two Pulitzer Prizes in that time.

Steiger served six years as chairman of the Knight Foundation-supported Committee to Protect Journalists and nine years on the Pulitzer Prize Board, the last as its chairman. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and of the steering committee of the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press.

Awards include the Columbia Journalism Award, the American Society of News Editors Leadership Award, the Gerald Loeb Award for lifetime achievement from the John E. Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA and the Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism from Harvard’s Joan Shorenstein Center.

Steiger began his career as a reporter at The Wall Street Journal's San Francisco bureau in 1966. He later worked for the Los Angeles Times, including time as the paper's Washington, economics correspondent and as its business editor. In 1983, he rejoined the Journal as an assistant managing editor. During his time as a reporter, Steiger earned three Gerald Loeb awards and two John Hancock awards for economics and business coverage. He received a bachelor's degree in economics from Yale University in 1964.

He is the co-author of the book, The '70s Crash and How to Survive It (World Pub. Co., 1970).