Keynote Speaker: Michael Oneal

We are pleased to introduce you to this year's Annual Day keynote speaker. Mr. Oneal will give the morning address, which will be followed by the breakout sessions. We will be providing biographies, throughout the coming weeks, of all the speakers so that students have as much information about the fascinating professional they will have a chance to hear on January 25th.

Michael Oneal is a senior business writer for the Chicago Tribune covering a broad array of subjects ranging from global economics to child-product safety. He has led a number of award-winning projects for the business section and was a member of the six-person reporting team that won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Journalism for a series of stories on unsafe toys that helped focus public awareness on the issue, leading to major changes at the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. He has reported in China, India, Europe and throughout the United States.

Oneal was Tribune’s lead reporter on the global economic crisis, reporting in Washington and Chicago, and was responsible for chronicling the bankruptcies of both his own employer, Tribune Co., and its chief rival, Sun-Times Media Group. Other notable projects have included a multi-part, front-page series telling the story of how Boeing Co. pulled itself back from the brink against Airbus, which Tribune nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and a series of stories on the Sears takeover, which won the breaking news award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Another front-page series on how one American company’s fateful outsourcing decisions changed lives forever in India and Indiana received an honorable mention from the Overseas Press Club and was a finalist for the Scripts Howard Foundation National Journalism Award.

Prior to joining the Tribune, Mr. Oneal was co-founder and executive editor of a financial Website called SmartMoney.com, which won several major awards including the 2001 National Magazine Award for New Media Design. Oneal spent nine years prior to that writing and editing for BusinessWeek magazine in New York and Chicago. He began his career with American City Business Journals as part of a start-up team that launched highly profitable weekly papers in San Jose, Sacramento and Milwaukee.

Mr. Oneal was a 2001-2002 Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan and earned his B.A. from Stanford University. His freelance articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, SmartMoney, Golf Digest and Italy’s Corriere della Sera. He grew up in Ann Arbor, MI., where he graduated from Greenhills School in 1978. He currently lives with his wife, Anne, and five-year-old son, Charlie, in Chicago.