WSJ makes changes to finance team, hires four

Wall Street Journal US financial editor Charles Forelle sent out the following on Friday:

Hi all,

Exciting times in Finance (and of course finance). I’m happy to share with you some new roles and new faces.

Live Markets is off to a lively start. Three reporters are at the heart of the team:

Gunjan Banerji is named Lead Writer for Live Markets. In this new role, she’ll be a presence on the Live Markets platform and off it. Gunjan will write widely on markets and help us define new ways of doing sophisticated, in-the-moment journalism. Gunjan joined the Journal from Debtwire in 2016 and has been at the center of meme-stock mania and volatility spikes. And she’s our resident expert in the thorny land of options and derivatives. Gunjan is a regular contributor to CNBC, and you can catch her in our GameStop documentary on Netflix. Gunjan was one of the reporters just awarded a Loeb for GameStop coverage.

Hannah Miao and Eric Wallerstein have joined us as reporters for Live Markets. Both bring strong markets knowledge as well as experience with an array of digital reporting formats. Hannah was previously at CNBC, where she wrote voraciously on markets of all kinds for CNBC.com, worked on newsletters and wrote for CNBC Pro. Hannah is a graduate of Duke University. Eric came from Hedgeye Risk Management, where he wrote articles on markets and the macroeconomy, handled the Hedgeye Twitter account and wrote newsletters. Before Hedgeye he was an analyst at the New York Fed. He is a graduate of Bucknell University.

Christina Rexrode will return to reporting and will write about retail investing and retail investors around the U.S. Christina is a deft and patient editor and one of our finest prose stylists. As deputy banking editor and as a finance news editor, she steered memorable stories about consumer finance—and wrote memorably about financial challenges of child care during the pandemic. As part of her retail beat she’ll be our eyes and ears on the emerging financial hubs of the Southeast from her base in Charlotte, N.C. Christina joined the Journal in 2014 as a banking reporter; before that she’d covered business and finance for the St. Petersburg Times, the Charlotte Observer, the AP and MarketWatch.

Vicky Ge Huang joined the Journal from Business Insider as a markets reporter covering crypto—and just in time for the meltdown! You’ve seen her byline all over the place, on Celsius, Voyager, Three Arrows Capital and more. At Insider, Vicky covered the crypto boom and emerging blockchain technologies as well as trading and market strategy. She was previously a reporter for AdvisorHub and Citywire. She has a masters’ degree from Columbia Journalism School.

Gunjan, Hannah, Eric, Christina and Vicky are on the U.S. Markets team, run by Aaron Kuriloff and Lauren Pollock.

Lauren Thomas starts Monday as a reporter covering deals and Wall Street. Lauren comes to us from CNBC, where she wrote about retail and specialized in IPOs and other transactions. Covering retail for the past several years meant bankruptcies and mergers and executive struggles and strategy shifts and all manner of excitement. Lauren was in the thick of it with deep and scoopy reporting on Peloton and others. Lauren is a graduate of UNC-Chapel Hill. She joins the Wall Street team led by Marie Beaudette and Dana Cimilluca.

David Wainer is our new Heard on the Street writer on pharma and healthcare. David comes to us from Bloomberg, where most recently he covered the United Nations and foreign policy. He previously worked for more than a decade in Israel for Bloomberg, covering economics, politics, and the healthcare and tech scenes. David is a native of Brazil and speaks Portuguese, Spanish and Hebrew. He reports to Heard on the Street Editor Spencer Jakab.

Across the pond…

Ed Ballard is the editor of our new WSJ Climate & Energy newsletter, whose inaugural issue came off the email presses last month (sign up!). C&E draws from across Dow Jones for detailed reporting and analysis on climate and the energy transition. Ed, who is a 10-year Dow Jones veteran and is based in London, was previously bureau chief of WSJ Pro Sustainable Business. Ed reports to Ken Brown, the editor for financial risk, enforcement and regulation.

Chelsey Dulaney is back! Chelsey was an intern at the Journal in 2014, then she covered spot news and currencies and was an anchor of our MoneyBeat blog. She left to take a Fulbright fellowship in Germany and stayed in Berlin, where she reported for Deutsche Welle. Now she’s on the London markets team writing about the intersection of central banks and markets.

Anna Hirtenstein has added commodities to her portfolio as a London-based markets reporter. Anna landed important stories in recent months on the Russian oil trade, including disruption at the start of the war and how the Russian oil industry has dusted itself off. She’s also taken on Evergrande’s bonds, yen hedge-fund trades and ship-to-ship transfers of Russian crude. Anna joined the Journal in 2019. Before that, she was a green-energy investment banker and a journalist at Bloomberg.

Josh Mitchell has moved to London to cover finance in the City of London, including HSBC and Barclays. Josh is a veteran of the D.C. bureau, where he wrote about the economy and became a preeminent authority on student debt. His reporting on the boom in student loans made plain how the bill got so big for so many. (You’ll recall the orthodontist with $1,060,945.42 in loans.) He’s the author of “The Debt Trap,” published last year.

Chelsey, Anna and Josh report to Europe Finance Editor Alex Frangos.

And two editors on the move…

Quentin Webb is named Deputy Europe Finance Editor, helping oversee our coverage in EMEA from London. Quentin joined the Journal in Hong Kong in 2018 as Asia Markets Editor, overseeing a team of markets reporters and shepherding a huge variety of stories—on the Chinese property-developer debacle, on the technology-company crackdown, on Hong Kong’s future as a financial center, and more. He also reported on the downfall of Evergrande. Before the Journal, Quentin spent 15 years at Reuters, both as a news reporter and as a Breakingviews columnist. Quentin reports to Alex Frangos.

Matt Thomas succeeds Quentin as Asia Markets Editor. Matt has been in Asia since 2008 and has worked in Hong Kong for a variety of publications, most recently Euromoney as its Asia Bureau Chief. Before journalism, Matt traded currencies for a bit, and he cut his teeth covering commercial paper and securitization vehicles during the financial crisis. Also: He’s finishing up his first novel. Matt reports to Asia Finance Editor Serena Ng.

-Charles