AP hires USA Today real estate reporter to run new service

The AP announced Wednesday that it has hired Noelle Knox, a national real estate reporter for USA Today, to help create and lead a new real estate and home news service offering breaking news, news-driven features, service articles, multimedia and data.

The real estate and home service, called AP Business: Real Estate & Home, is the first targeted news product from AP’s newly created Financial and Business News division.

The division is responsible for AP’s financial news coverage and for developing new content products to satisfy the needs of print, digital, broadcast and commercial customers. As real estate editor, Knox, who has 18 years of business reporting experience, will help launch the service in the first half of the year.

The creation of a new real estate and home news service is part of the AP 2.0 corporate strategy focusing on financial news, entertainment and sports. In financial news, Kristin Gazlay, AP’s managing editor for financial news and global training, said, AP’s strategy is to become a leading provider of deep, expert coverage on targeted business topics.

“We maintain our core commitment to breaking financial news,” Gazlay said.

Knox, who has a Virginia real estate license, graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a degree in economics. She was a reporter for various news companies in California and in Detroit before joining the AP for the first time in 1998, covering banking and investment banking in New York. She joined USA Today as a business writer in 2000 and, three years later, became a European correspondent based in Brussels, a position she held until taking over the U.S.-based real estate beat in 2006.