Reuters hire three new biz columnists

Reuters announced Thursday the hiring of Agnes Crane, Matthew Goldstein and Christopher Swann, who will join the newly created commentary team as columnists.

Based in New York City, all three will report into Jeffrey Cane, U.S. editor, commentary, and will start later in May and early June.

Crane has been on the front lines in the coverage of the credit crisis. As an editor at Dow Jones Newswires, she led a team of eight reporters who cover the credit markets and debt instruments. She had previously been a reporter for Dow Jones, covering global sovereign debt markets. In 2005, she won a Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page Award for deadline reporting. Crane was a fixed-income reporter for Market News International and before that had worked as a reporter in Mexico City for four years. She is a graduate of Temple University.

Goldstein has been one of the most adept reporters covering Wall Street in recent years. He has covered banking, hedge funds and securities regulation. For the last two years, Matthew has been a senior writer for BusinessWeek, writing on Wall Street, hedge funds and regulation. He was the co-author of a cover story on the collapse of the Bear Stearns hedge funds and started the magazine’s Unstructured Finance blog.

Previously, at TheStreet.com, Goldstein broke a number of stories, including the news that the Securities and Exchange Commission was investigating whether brokers were permitting customers to eavesdrop on their firms’ internal ‘squawk box’ conversations. His stories on the “squawk box” investigation were a finalist for a Gerald Loeb Award in 2006. Goldstein  was also a reporter for Crain’s New York Business, The New York Law Journal, The Record of Hackensack and The Central New Jersey Home News. A graduate of the University of Rochester , Goldstein has a law degree from Fordham.

Swann joins Reuters from Bloomberg News, where he covered the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury. He was among the Bloomberg reporters who recently won the Overseas Press Club’s Malcolm Forbes Award for the series “Recipe for Famine.” Before Bloomberg, Swann worked for the Financial Times for nine years. A graduate of Oxford University , he has a master’s degree in international relations from Cambridge.