BuzzFeed hires new business reporter

BuzzFeed, which launches a business news desk in 2014 with four reporters and an editor, has added to that by hiring a reporter — Molly Hensley-Clancy — to cover the business of education.

Hensley-Clancy currently works as an editorial assistant at Reuters. She will start at BuzzFeed on March 10.

Hensley-Clancy has covered business news for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and residential and commercial real estate business for the Wall Street Journal. Before embarking on a career in journalism, She worked as a teaching assistant in several city public schools and is deeply interested in educational inequality and access in education.

“Molly is an ambitious, aggressive, talented young journalist who is equally comfortable covering a board of education meeting or an earnings report,” said BuzzFeed business editor Peter Lauria in a statement. “How money affects education is what this beat is all about, and Molly’s ability to be understand and put into context how the two are intertwined is a perfect match.

“We are going to be looking at how big corporations like News Corp and Amazon and Apple are newly altering the environment for education, how entrenched players like Pearson are fighting back, and how upstarts like Chegg are trying to carve out a niche,” added Lauria. “We see an avenue to cover that from a business perspective that is currently lacking from a lot of mainstream education coverage, and Molly will be at the forefront of bringing this type of news to a large consumer audience.”

Hensley-Clancy is a Yale University graduate.