TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Francesco Guerrera, the editor of the Money & Investing section of The Wall Street Journal, sent out the following staff announcement on Thursday:
We’re pleased to announce that Kirsten Grind will be joining the Journal to cover asset-management firms and personal finance for the Money & Investing section. We plan to ramp up our coverage of BlackRock, Pimco, Vanguard, Fidelity and the industry’s other big players significantly in the coming months. Part Wall Street, part investing, the beat is teeming with interesting, well-paid subjects whose successes and failures affect the retirement plans and pensions of tens of millions of people around the world.
Kirsten is perfect for the job. She joins us from American City Business Journals, where, most famously, she anchored the Puget Sound Business Journal’s coverage of Washington Mutual—work for which she was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Loeb Award in 2010. Most impressively, Kirsten hadn’t written a single banking story before diving into that beat. Earlier in her career, Kirsten worked for the Seattle Times and the Coloradoan in Fort Collins, Colo.
In other staffing news, Joe Light has joined the personal-finance team to write about investing. Since March 2010, Joe has been a key member of the careers group, most recently helping to spearhead the excellent Generation Jobless series. Joe has also written about outsourcing job hunts to India, people whose names are eerily well-suited for their professions, and young adults dropping out of the labor force. Before coming to the Journal, Joe worked for Money magazine, covering investing and real estate.
Please join us in welcoming Kirsten to the Journal (she starts on Jan. 17), and in wishing Joe well in his important new assignment. Both will report to Rob Hunter.
