Changes made to WSJ’s legal team

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Joanna Chung, the Wall Street Journal‘s bureau chief overseeing its legal coverage, made the following staff announcements on Wednesday afternoon:

We’re pleased to announce several new appointments to the Journal’s Law Bureau.

Reed Albergotti, who will cover New York courts, prosecutors and enforcement agencies, joins our group from the WSJ’s sports section, where he was an investigative reporter digging into stories like the Tiger Woods scandal, the fatal luge crash at the Vancouver Olympics, and the Penn State child-molestation case. He led coverage of the probe into doping on Lance Armstrong’s cycling team, for which he won a 2010 National Headliner award. Perhaps more impressively, he uncovered a video, hidden for 25 years, showing the first ever slam dunk in a women’s college basketball game. Reed is a graduate of San Diego State University, an accomplished amateur cyclist and one of the only WSJ reporters to ever appear on “The Tyra Banks Show.”

Steve Eder, who will cover national legal news, comes from the hedge-fund beat in Money & Investing, where he broke news on insider trading, public pension fund investments and Warren Buffet’s succession plans. Before he joined the Journal in 2010, he covered banks at Reuters and legal issues as an investigative reporter for The Toledo Blade. He was part of The Blade team that uncovered Ohio’s “Coingate” scandal, a fraud centered on a state investment in rare coins that led to the criminal conviction of Ohio Gov. Bob Taft. The team was named a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service and won a Gerald Loeb Award. Steve graduated from Michigan State University.

Joe Palazzolo, who officially logged in as the WSJ Law Blogger in mid-October, also writes broadly about legal matters including foreign bribery, the plaintiffs’ bar and judges. As a reporter covering corruption for Dow Jones Newswires, Joe broke a number of stories about companies being investigated for bribery overseas. He previously covered the Justice Department for the Legal Times, writing extensively about detainee cases, the corruption trial of former Sen. Ted Stevens and shakeups inside the DOJ. Joe earned an undergraduate degree at St. Louis University and a master’s from the University of Maryland.

Jennifer Smith, who takes over responsibility for law firms and corporate law, was previously a reporter at Newsday, where she won awards for her coverage of breaking news, the environment and politics. She has handled a range of topics, from the downfall of Gov. Eliot Spitzer to the dilemma of where to house paroled sex offenders. Most recently, she wrote about environmental issues, uncovering the industry money behind plastic bag recycling laws and blogging about climate change from a remote Arctic field station. Jen earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of California at Santa Cruz and a master’s degree from Columbia.