September 22, 2009

Poughkeepsie, N.Y. – The United States auto industry will be the focus of a lecture by Paul Ingrassia, a 31-year veteran of The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Ingrassia won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 as the Journal’s Detroit bureau chief for coverage of the prior year’s crisis at General Motors.

“Crash Course: The American Automobile Industry’s Road from Glory to Disaster” is free and open to the public. It will be held on October 6 at 7 p.m. in the James and Betty Hall Theatre on the main DCC campus in Poughkeepsie.

Ingrassia, along with Journal Deputy Bureau Chief Joseph B. White, with whom he shared the Pulitzer and a Loeb Award, authored a book called “Comeback: the Fall and Rise of the American Automobile Industry,” released in 1994. For 10 years beginning in 1996, Ingrassia was president of Dow Jones Newswires, overseeing 700 journalists and a $225 million annual budget.

Currently Ingrassia is writing a new book, for which his lecture is named, to be published in January of 2010, and is also an adjunct faculty member at the Columbia School of Journalism.

He has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

The lecture is sponsored by the TD Bank Endowed Chair, DCC Professor Peter Rivera, and the DCC Foundation.

For more information, call the DCC Foundation at 845-431-8400.

Founded in 1957, Dutchess Community College is a two-year community college with more than 50 years of service to the residents of Dutchess County. Visit www.sunydutchess.edu.