AP markets editor leaves for Reuters, which revamps wealth management team

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Jennifer Merritt, who joined the AP business desk in April to be its financial markets editor, is now leaving for a job at Reuters.

Reuters financial companies editor Jed Horowitz wrote to the staff in an e-mail:

I’m excited to announce the launch of our revamped Wealth Management team, which will provide news, commentary, practical business tips and industry gossip to the vast pool of retail stockbrokers and investment advisers who use Thomson Reuters “workstations,” and to their clients who read Reuters news.

The team will be led by Jennifer Merritt, an energetic and sharp-witted journalist who is joining from her post as financial markets editor of The Associated Press. Jennifer leveraged early-career internships at “Business Week,” “The Palm Beach Post” and “The Boston Globe” into senior editorial positions overseeing personal finance, wealth and markets coverage at the “Florida Times-Union,” “Money” and smartmoney.com and wsj.com. She also has been department editor of management education at “Business Week.”

Joining Jennifer will be Suzanne Barlyn, the current “Compliance Watch” columnist at Dow Jones and a frequent contributor to “The Wall Street Journal,” who will bring her smart coverage of legal, regulatory and oversight issues–and her wide following in the brokerage community–to Reuters as our compliance columnist. Suzanne, who is a nonpracticing attorney, also put in time as a reporter at “Fortune.”

Jennifer and Suzanne will start on Sept.6.

Also on the team are Reuters veterans Joe Giannone, who launched wealth management coverage for the wire more than two years ago, and John McCrank, who has led our Canadian wealth management coverage for the past two years (when he wasn’t running marathons). John will be joining us in New York as soon as he gets his visa. They will continue to offer detailed coverage of the earnings, cultural shifts and trends at big brokerage houses, independent brokers and advisory shops and discount brokerages.

Herb Lash and Manuela Badawy will contribute their considerable investment strategy skills to crafting daily investment features for advisers, with the editorial help of Jen Ablan and Chris Sanders. Please circulate any investment-related analyst reporters or other releases keyed to events of the day to Herb and Manuela.

Rounding out the group are two newcomers. Jessica Toonkel has been scaring mutual fund and exchange-traded fund marketers and salespeople for almost a decade with her coverage of their pricing policies and profit motives, and will continue that mission as the team’s chief products reporter. Jessica, who has turned out an impressive array of columns and articles since her arrival in mid-August, has worked at Crain’s “Investment News” and been managing editor of several mutual fund newsletters at Institutional Investor. She’s also covered technology at “American Banker” and “Financial NetAlert” (out of Berlin) and worked at “American Lawyer” and “Counsel Connect.”

Ashley Lau, who is completing her internship on the markets team in New York after stints at MarketWatch, NPR’s national desk and NPR’s “Planet Money” economics show, will be dogging the movement and motivations of brokers and advisers who switch jobs. Ashley, raised in Maryland and now an upper WestSider, graduated recently from Medill.

We’re also pleased that freelancers Jim Saft and Richard Koreto will be contributing weekly columns on economic issues and practice management aimed at our WM audience. And we’re lucky to have Lauren Young’s Personal Finance team pitch in by adapting its steady diet of consumer-aimed columns to our professional brokerage audience.

The excellent U.S.-based editorial team behind our Wealth Management, Inv. Mgt. and Asset Mgt. top news pages — Richard Satran, Bernadette Baum, Chelsea Emery and Walden Siew — will serve as deskers for the WM team