WSJ finance desk makes beat changes promotions, hires

Charles Forelle, the financial editor of The Wall Street Journal, sent out the following on Tuesday:

Hi all,

There is a lot going on in Finance (also in finance), and I’m very excited to share with you some new faces, new roles and new opportunities.

Angel Au-Yeung is our new beat reporter on BlackRock and will write about asset management and the buy side of Wall Street. Angel comes to the Journal from Forbes, where she was on the billionaires beat. She’s done eye-opening reporting on the rich and famous, and is the co-author of a forthcoming book on Tony Hsieh.

Laura Cooper moves across the fifth floor from WSJ Pro Private Equity and is writing about deals, private equity and more. Laura has deep experience covering healthcare investing, and she’s no stranger to Finance, having teamed up regularly on coverage of private-equity ownership of hospitals and buyout scoops. Laura joined the Journal in 2015.

Ben Foldy now covers financial crime, fraud and enforcement. Ben was previously an autos reporter in the Detroit bureau, where he developed a taste for deep dissection of financial filings writing about Nikola, Rivian, Lucid, Carvana and others. If you’re intrigued by the use of tax-receivable agreements in Up-C IPOs, you and Ben and I should get together for a spirited lunch.

Charley Grant is covering Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley after a marquee run at Heard as its expert on electric vehicles and health care. He had a busy pandemic, guiding Heard readers through Covid’s effects on insurers, vaccine makers, pharmacies and hospitals. His knowledge of biotech and his financial-report savvy were key to the Journal’s coverage of fraud at MiMedx. Charley, who is a CFA, joined the Journal in 2015.

Matt Grossman will move from the Real Time Desk to markets. On RT, he covered the waterfront of corporate news: tech, healthcare, biotech, space flight and the technocoronation of Elon Musk. On markets he’ll have a similarly wide portfolio; assignment #1 is oil and energy. Matt worked for bond-rating firms and wrote for a commercial real-estate publication before joining the Journal in early 2020.

Megha Mandavia joins Heard on the Street from India’s Economic Times, where she was assistant editor. She reported widely on giant Indian conglomerates, the Indian tech sector, and Chinese and American companies’ attempts to crack the Indian market. Megha is based in Bangalore and will write for Heard about technology and economic issues across Asia, with a focus on India.

Amrith Ramkumar takes on climate finance and green investing. Amrith began his Journal career as an intern and then joined the markets team full time, covering metals and energy (he’s written about oil below minus $37 a barrel and above $100 a barrel). When SPACs burst onto the scene, Amrith in short order became a SPAC wizard, launched a SPAC newsletter and racked up an enviable string of SPAC scoops.

Liz Hoffman and Cara Lombardo are named senior reporters.

Liz joined the Journal in 2013 and most recently covered Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, where among other things she scooped the departure of Lloyd Blankfein. But you see her byline all over the place because she’s an endlessly curious reporter with a monster Rolodex that puts her in the middle of the action on all manner of finance and business stories—SoftBank, Tesla, even Colin Kaepernick’s SPAC. Liz, who has an inside-the-boardroom book on the early days of the pandemic in the works, will write widely on Wall Street.

Cara is the dominant M&A reporter in the business. She started at the Journal on the Real Time Desk in 2017 and began covering activism on the Deals team the next year. She’s run the tables on deal scoops—including Raytheon-United Technologies, Salesforce-Slack and S&P–IHS Markit. Her activism scoops include the departure of Peloton’s CEO and Carl Icahn’s fight with McDonald’s over pigs. In a previous life, Cara audited big banks. She’ll continue to be our lead M&A reporter and will expand her writing about dealmakers, the business of dealmaking and more.

Angel, Laura, Charley, Liz and Cara are part of the Wall Street team led by Marie Beaudette and Dana Cimilluca. Ben and Amrith join Ken Brown’s Financial Risk, Enforcement and Regulation group. Matt joins the U.S. Markets group run by Aaron Kuriloff and Lauren Pollock. Megha reports to Asia Heard on the Street editor Nate Taplin.

Across the pond:

Eliot Brown is now a finance reporter in London, where he’ll turn his keen eye for excess on global money and the people who make and lose it. Eliot, an 11-year Journal veteran, has covered real estate in New York and venture capital in San Francisco, and of course the cosmic fusion of both in WeWork. He is the co-author of The Cult of We.

Caitlin McCabe has moved to London as a markets reporter. Caitlin, who was an intern in 2014, came back to the Journal just before the pandemic on the New York markets team, in perfect time to cover the biggest crash since 1987, the biggest rebound in nearly a century and the mania in meme stocks. Caitlin previously covered real estate for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Eliot and Caitlin report to Europe Finance Editor Alex Frangos.

If this all sounds as fun to you as it does to me, we have a host of job openings in New York and London. Check out wsj.jobs. Among them:

Wall Street Journal Jobs We’re looking for great journalists and innovative minds to join our newsroom as we continue to tell the importa…

• We are starting an ambitious new project that will change how we cover financial markets digitally. We’re seeking reporters who can think sharp and fast, and who are hungry to cover markets as they happen. And we need reporters with a variety of skills, so if you’re excited by markets and your second language is charts, we should talk.
• We’re seeking a London-based deputy editor to help run the finance and markets coverage in that region. This is an opportunity to take on a leadership role in the middle of a giant story.
• We’re seeking a Heard writer to cover health care, including pharmaceuticals and biotech.

-Charles