Laurie Hays

Laurie Hays is Editor-in-Chief and CEO of The Fuller Project, overseeing both the day-to-day operations of the newsroom and the business functions of the nonprofit. 

Hays’ professional journalism career began in New Orleans as a politics and education reporter for the States-Item and Times Picayune. After joining the Wall Street Journal in 1986, she went on to report from Moscow during the fall of the Soviet Union from 1990 to 1993, to become bureau chief in Atlanta, to serve as national news editor starting in 2003, and finally to become assistant managing editor for investigations. After 23 years, she left the Journal in 2008 for Bloomberg News to oversee 1,200 beat reporters globally and reshape the newsroom to break more stories and pursue stronger enterprise articles. Under her leadership, Bloomberg won its first and only Pulitzer Prize, along with numerous education and business reporting awards.

She left Bloomberg in 2015 to work in crisis consulting for Brunswick and Edelman, and later founded Laurie Hays & Assoc., a strategic communications advisory firm focused on business and society, primarily working on #MeToo issues and advocating for equality in the workplace for women and people of color. She writes a Substack column, Boardroom Confidential, and has been published in Barron’s, Fortune Magazine and the Harvard Law School Forum on issues of gender equality and corporate governance. She has been a passionate journalist and feminist since high school, when she became the first woman editor of the newspaper at Phillips Exeter Academy, which had just gone co-ed. 

Hays serves on the boards of the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York, the Overseas Press Club, and the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism. She was a founding director of the Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit Marshall Project and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Economic Club of New York.

She was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard College, with an honors degree in American History. She is based in New York City.