The Information hires three for finance desk

The Information finance editor Nate Becker sent out the following on Thursday:

Exciting news, all! We’ve hired three reporters to join Finance, and there will be more to come as we continue to make The Information even more essential to readers who want to know what’s happening at the intersection of tech and finance. Get ready for scoops and coverage that is cutting edge and constantly moving the ball forward. Without further ado, here are the newest members of the Finance team:

Lauren Tara LaCapra joins as our lead Wall Street reporter. She has spent nearly two decades as a business journalist, including a decade at Reuters, where she was one of the senior editors managing the global finance and markets team. Before she became an editor at Reuters, she was a star investment-banking reporter, breaking news on Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. She joins us from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where she spent more than a year working on the bank’s digital strategy. She has also worked at The Wall Street Journal, the Associated Press, TheStreet and Fusion, mostly covering Wall Street banks and the broader financial-services industry. For us, Lauren will cover Wall Street with a fury and will also focus on breaking news around the deals those banks are doing. She’ll be an eager newsroom mentor and will play a key role in shaping the Finance team’s coverage with me. Lauren lives in New York with her fiancé Chris and two dogs, Tallulah & Duney. She loves the beach, traveling and holding powerful people accountable.

Cory Weinberg has moved to Finance as a senior reporter covering IPOs, where he’ll be digging into companies as they navigate the process of going public (or, as has been the case recently, struggling to figure out how and when to go public). This is a really important addition to our existing lineup of badass reporters who cover the entire life cycle of startups – Kate, Erin, Maria and now Cory. A corporate-finance geek, Cory will dive deep into the money situations of companies nearing the public markets. He’ll break news on firms like Instacart, Stripe and Reddit, and he’ll always be on the lookout for the next WeWork. He will also chronicle the types of innovations that are borne from the IPO process – changes in corporate governance, voting structure, CEO pay and anything else that’s changing the game. A seven-year veteran of The Information, I’ll also trust Cory to play a big part in how we Information-ize our coverage of the finance world. Cory was part of our team that won the SABEW in 2021 for coverage of startups and tech workers amid the onset of Covid-19. He was a Knight-Bagehot fellow in 2021-22 and will finish his Columbia MBA this year. To fit in with his new New York lifestyle of chatting with bankers, he has purchased one (1) vest. When I asked him if it was a Patagonia, he responded, “I won’t go that far.”

Michael Roddan is joining as our banking reporter. He comes to us after nearly three years at The Australian Financial Review, the country’s top newspaper, where he was most recently an award-winning national correspondent tasked with investigating and breaking open scandals across business and politics. Before that, he spent about six years as a reporter for Australia’s best-selling broadsheet, The Australian, where he covered major banks and financial institutions, economic and regulatory policy, and corporate snafus. He wrote a 2019 book titled “The People vs The Banks” that told the story of a clash between Australia’s banks and its government. For The Information, Michael will delve into some of the biggest institutions in finance, including JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citi, as they deepen their ties with the tech world and continue to look more and more like tech companies themselves. He’ll also keep tabs on personalities like Jamie Dimon and work to nail down deals scoops. When Michael isn’t tracking down trouble at financial institutions, you can find him out on a bush walk (that’s a hike, for those of us in the U.S.) or trying, in vain, to grow tomatoes in his backyard. He’ll take up residence in New York soon.

As I mentioned, there’s more to come! I’m still in the process of hiring for several roles. As always, if you know of someone who should absolutely work here, please let me know.

Nate