Boston bureau chief for Reuters joins energy team

Jonathan Leff, global editor for commodities at Reuters, sent out the following announcement:

We are pleased to announce that Richard Valdmanis will be expanding his responsibilities to become part of the greater U.S. energy team, bringing his deep knowledge and enterprise reporting skills to bear on the enormous and evolving energy story. While retaining his Boston Bureau Chief duties and title, Rich will also pursue original, enterprising stories that will augment our excellent industry, markets and policy coverage. He will focus on examining energy and environment issues through a political lens: from the states’ perspective, where so much of the policy action meets the road, as well as in the context of the 2016 presidential campaign.  Rich will also probe the political tensions within the corporate world and the green movement to give us a more sophisticated understanding of the competing interests sparring  over America’s energy future. In this capacity Rich will work most directly with Bruce Wallace and his energy policy and environment team, while collaborating frequently with reporters across the sector, and the nation, to tell the story of how policy issues play out in American communities.

Rich joined Reuters in 1999 as a news assistant on the energy desk in New York, when a barrel of oil fetched $10. He reported on oil markets for five years and in 2005 became Editor in Charge of Americas Energy, catching the bulk of the bull run. Rich left New York in 2009 to become Deputy Bureau Chief for West and Central Africa, where he covered the war in Mali, the revolution in Tunisia, and was part of the team of reporters that earned a Pulitzer nomination for coverage of Gadaffi’s overthrow in Libya (though he humbly notes his role was trunk writing and slot cover from Tunis).

Rich became Boston Bureau Chief in 2013, and has been involved in several oil-related stories since, including coverage of the Lac-Megantic oil train crash in Quebec, a Special Report on the influence of the billionaire Irving family on Canada’s most ambitious oil pipeline project, and an Insight into the coal background of Tom Steyer, one of America’s richest and best-known environmental activists.

We are excited to have Rich join our coverage of this vital issue at a defining time.