March 19, 2024

Paul Ingrassia, Prizewinning Auto Industry Reporter, Dies at 69

Writing in The Journal around the time the book was published, Mr. Ingrassia asserted that in return for any direct government aid to G.M., “the board and the management should go.”

Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity,” he wrote. “And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp GM with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible.”

He added: “Giving GM a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

Mr. Ingrassia’s latest book was “Engines of Change: A History of the American Dream in Fifteen Cars” (2012), which The Times described as “a highly informed but breezy narrative history of the vehicles that have shaped and reflected American culture.”

Paul Joseph Ingrassia was born on Aug 18, 1950, in Laurel, Miss., to Angelo and Regina (Iacono) Ingrassia. His father was a research chemist, his mother a homemaker. He earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a master’s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

He began his news career at the Lindsay-Schaub Newspaper Group in Decatur, Ill. in 1973.

Mr. Ingrassia worked for Dow Jones Co. from 1977 to 2007. From 1998 to 2006, he was president of Dow Jones Newswires, an arm of The Journal’s parent company. He was vice president for news strategy at Dow Jones when he left the company in 2007, after it had been bought by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Mr. Ingrassia was named deputy editor in chief of Thomson Reuters in 2011 and was managing editor of Reuters from 2007 to 2016. Most recently he was editor at the Revs Institute, an automotive history research center in Naples.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/16/business/media/paul-ingrassia-dead.html?emc=rss&partner=rss

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