Gerber joins LA Times biz desk as enterprise reporter

Los Angeles Times business editor Jeff Bercovici sent out the following on Wednesday:

Marisa Gerber has joined Business as an enterprise reporter who will focus on ambitious, high-impact narrative journalism that captures the realities and stakes of a changing economy in the state and elsewhere.

Her focus will encompass subjects including immigration, automation, the housing shortage, the fraying of community ties and the lingering effects of the pandemic. She will explore the ways people experience the economy: as workers, as consumers, as renters and homeowners, as entrepreneurs and as patients and caregivers.

In her debut pieces for Business, she chronicled the evolving norms of tipping in the U.S. and wrote a dispatch from the border about how TikTok and other social media have changed the way people migrate.

Gerber was recently named a Livingston Award finalist for a piece about a woman’s decision to die, and celebrate life, on her own terms. She was also part of a team of Los Angeles Times reporters awarded the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News for coverage of the leaked audio recording capturing city leaders making racist comments, as well as the team selected as a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Local Reporting for an investigative series examining inequities, corruption and a failure to protect workers in California’s recreational cannabis market.

Since joining The Times in 2012, Gerber has covered local, national and international breaking news and reported from Mexico, Guatemala and Puerto Rico. Before joining Business, she spent several years on the Metro desk, where she covered L.A. County’s criminal courts and wrote narrative features about life in and around the Southland. She grew up in Nogales, Ariz., and graduated from the University of Arizona.