Johnnie L. Roberts joined Newsweek's Business department as a senior writer in 1994 after 14 years at The Wall Street Journal. He covers the media and entertainment industries.

Roberts, 41, joined the Journal's Boston bureau as a reporter and transferred to the New York office in 1985. While at the Journal, he covered telecommunications, consumer electronics, advertising and the newspaper and electronic-information industries. In addition, Roberts covered major industrial giants such as General Electric and Ingersoll Rand.

Roberts has been on the media and entertainment beat since 1990, and has covered some of corporate America's largest deals as a consolidation trend swept the communications industry. He was the principle reporter covering, among other things, the takeover battle for Paramount Communications and CBS Inc., and played a pivotal role in the coverage of the aborted Bell Atlantic takeover of Tele-Communications Inc., a company that was the subject of a major WSJ investigative report by Roberts.

At Newsweek, Roberts has covered major entertainment deals, including the Time Warner-Turner Broadcasting, Disney-ABC and Seagram-MCA transactions. Representing the magazine, he often appears as a media analyst on numerous cable and broadcast television programs, including PBS-TV's "Charlie Rose," and "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer," the syndicated "Entertainment Tonight," and shows on CNN, MSNBC and CNBC.

Roberts was named one of the "100 Most Influential Business Journalists" of 1997 by The Journalist and Financial Reporter newsletter which rated him a "hot reporter on a hot beat in a hot book." In 1990, Roberts won the John Hancock Award for Excellence in Business and Financial Journalism for articles examining Dun & Bradstreet Corp.'s methods of rating the creditworthiness of companies.