Julie Meier Wright, the longtime president and CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp., said today she plans to retire June 30, although she will continue after that as a consultant for the rest of 2011. The EDC’s board plans to conduct a national search for a new CEO. After joining the EDC more than 13 years ago, Wright transformed the business development organization, which was dependent on a single public contract, to a private-sector driven organization supported by more than 150 San Diego area companies as well as nine municipalities, the County of San Diego, and other public agencies. Before joining the EDC in 1997, Wright served in the administration of Republican Gov. Pete Wilson as California’s first Secretary of Trade and Commerce and was a Wilson Cabinet member from 1991 to 1997. Before that, she spent 25 years in executive marketing and public affairs, including 14 years with TRW, now part of Northrop-Grumman.
Author: Bruce V. Bigelow
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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