Larry Kramer (Journalist)

For the American playwright and LBGT rights activist, see Larry Kramer (playwright). For the American football coach, see Larry Kramer (American football). For the law professor, see Larry Kramer (legal scholar).

Larry Kramer (born April 24, 1950) is chairman of TheStreet Inc. (TST), the financial news and information company based on Wall Street. He recently retired as president and publisher of USA Today and joined the boards of directors of Gannett (GCI) and MDC Partners (MDCA).He also serves on the Board of Harvard Business Publishing as a trustee to Syracuse University.

He served as an adjunct professor of media management at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University and a media consultant. His book “C-Scape: Conquer the Factors Changing Business Today,”was published in November, 2010 (HarperCollins). He was the founder, Chairman and CEO of MarketWatch Inc., which he created in 1995 and launched as an LLC with CBS in 1997.  He took it public in 1999, making three acquisitions to build the business along the way before selling the company to Dow Jones in 2005 for $528 million.

He then became the first president of CBS Digital Media, where from 2005-2008 he created a new division encompassing all new media operations for the network, including online, interactive and wireless initiatives. He introduced March Madness on Demand, put CBS TV shows on the Web and signed the first CBS content distribution partnerships with Google, Amazon, Apple iTunes, Yahoo! and Verizon. 

He has served on the Boards of Discovery Communications, American Media Inc, Freedom Communications, BlackArrow, Inc., and  Appinions Inc., among others.  He is also an advisor to several early stage companies like Rain, Inc., Jib Jab, Minyanville, StreetFight and others.

Larry started his career as a journalist, spending 20 years as a reporter and editor, rising to Asst. Managing Editor of The Washington Post, and Executive Editor of the San Francisco Examiner. He won several awards for reporting, including the National Press Club Award, The Associated Press Award for news writing and The Gerald Loeb award for business reporting. He covered many iconic stories as a reporter and photographer, including several national political conventions, Woodstock, The Patty Hearst kidnapping case and trial, an attempted assassination of then President Ford, The Jim Jones Ministry and the wake of the deaths at Jonestown and several major white collar crimes and investigations. As an editor, his staffs won two Pulitzer Prizes.

He was a Pulitzer Prize Juror for two terms. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and an M.B.A. from Harvard University.

He is married to Myla Lerner, a broadway producer and chairman of the board of Lean Ensemble, a theatre group in Hilton Head, SC.  He has two children, Matthew (Married to Michelle Kramer, with their two children, Lily and Jonah), a sports broadcasters agent for CAA, living in Atlanta;  and Erika Kramer, founder and president of SleevesUp Productions, a digital video production company in New York City.