Leslie Wayne is an award-winning former business reporter at The New York Times, media entrepreneur and journalism professor.

Wayne joined The Times in 1981 and has covered a broad array of topics including Wall Street, banking industry regulatory reform, municipal finance scandals and, more recently, the aerospace and military industries. Wayne has a master's degree in business administration from the Columbia Business School and was also a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economic Journalism.

In 2010, Wayne was selected as the first Donald W. Reynolds Visiting Professor in Business Journalism at Arizona State University. She also teaches business journalism at New York University as well as the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.

While at The Times, Wayne specialized in the intersection of business and politics and reported from The Times’ Washington bureau on lobbying and money-and-politics. She has been on The Times’ political campaign finance team in every election since 1996, covering campaign money-raising and looking into the finances of presidential candidates. She remains a contributing writer for the Sunday Business section of The Times.

Since 2010, Wayne has also been a senior editor at 100Reporters, an online international reporting project funded by the Ford Foundation.

She is the winner of the “Best of Bagehot” award, is a five-time winner of The New York Times “Publisher’s Award,” and was selected four times as a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Before coming to New York, Wayne had worked at The Philadelphia Inquirer and The News and Observer in Raleigh, N.C.. Wayne is an honors graduate of the University of Michigan and got her start in journalism writing for The Michigan Daily, the campus newspaper. Wayne has appeared on CNBC, Bloomberg television, and MSNBC, in addition to numerous New York Times videos and podcasts. She has also written for the "Caucus" political blog, the Huffington Post, and BusinessJournalism.org. She continues to lecture on business and politics at workshops in the United States and abroad.