National business journalist shares spiritual journey

Paul Solman, business and economics correspondent for the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer since 1985, will speak at 4:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 11, at the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave., as part of “Spiritual Sojourners,” a series sponsored by the Office of the Chaplain at Bates College. The public is invited to attend free of charge. For more information, call the chaplain’s office at 207-786-8272.

The founding editor of the alternative Boston weekly The Real Paper (1972), Solman began his career in business journalism as a Nieman Fellow, studying at the Harvard Business school in 1976. He has been a business reporter for public broadcasting since 1977 and was the co-originator and executive editor of PBS’s business documentary series, Enterprise. His reporting has won Emmys for the last four decades and two Peabody awards, the most recent in 2004 for his reporting on the undercounting of unemployment.

Solman has served on the Harvard Business School faculty, teaching media, finance and business history. He co-authored the well-received Life and Death on the Corporate Battlefield (1983), which appeared in Japanese, German and a pirated Taiwanese edition. He lectures on college campuses, has written for numerous publications including both Forbes and Mother Jones magazines, and was named a member of TV Guide’s “Dream Team” of television reporters.

A one-time cab driver, kindergarten teacher and management consultant, Solman is the presenter for and author of Discovering Economics with Paul Solman, a series of videos released in 2004 by McGraw-Hill to accompany the company’s introductory economics textbooks. He is married with children and grandchildren.

Solman’s talk, the fourth in the series, will be followed by four additional 90-minute presentations throughout the balance of the academic year. Each talk begins at 4:30 p.m.