Washington Post taps Somashekhar to be deputy biz editor

Washington Post Business Editor Lori Montgomery:

We’re delighted to announce that Sandhya Somashekhar, an insightful and creative editor with a long track record of delivering distinctive journalism, is being promoted to Deputy Business Editor.

Over nearly two decades at The Post, Sandhya’s talent, ambition and collaborative spirit have drawn fans in every corner of the newsroom. As an editor, she has led some of The Post’s most accomplished writers through some of its most complex investigations – always with exacting standards, deep empathy and a fierce dedication to doing whatever is right for the story.

Sandhya joined the Business desk two years ago from Outlook to manage a team of reporters covering an array of regulated industries including health care, medicine, food, energy and – most recently – transportation. In that role, she has overseen coverage of the arrival of the Ozempic era, the country’s looming electricity crisis, Boeing’s near-disastrous blowout over Portland this year and the failed effort to keep baby formula safe. She also launched the first stories in our yearlong exploration of the assisted living industry, including a look at how its backbreaking costs are imperiling the financial health of a generation of Americans, how some facilities are evicting people when their savings run dry and how – in a sad echo – some homeless shelters are now building their own assisted living units.<

Before her yearlong stint as an editor on Outlook, Sandhya spent four years as an editor on the National desk, becoming deputy editor for political enterprise and investigations during the chaotic early days of the Trump administration. In that position, she led coverage of Donald Trump’s vast business empire, including a prescient piece about Trump’s vacillating claims regarding the net worth of his assets and his company’s employment of undocumented workers. A former Post intern, Sandhya began her career here in 2006 as a reporter in the Local desk’s Loudoun County bureau. She later moved to the National desk, where she covered two presidential campaigns and became an inaugural member of the America desk, focusing on social movements including the fight to legalize same-sex marriage and the rise of Black Lives Matter. As a reporter, Sandhya was part of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize: In 2007, she was one of the first reporters to arrive in Blacksburg, Va., after a mass shooting left 32 dead at the Virginia Tech campus. And in 2015, she drew on our groundbreaking database of fatal police shootings to reveal that unarmed Black men were seven times more likely than Whites to die by police gunfire.

Sandhya grew up in Michigan and Maryland, earned a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Maryland and obtained her master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley, School of Journalism.

Please join me in congratulating Sandhya on her new role. She starts on Monday.