Charlotte paper names Stodghill business columnist

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Ron Stodghill, a former business journalist with BusinessWeek, Time and The New York Times, has been named a business columnist for the Charlotte Observer.

Business editor Patrick Scott tells Talking Biz News that Stodghill’s appointment was announced Thursday to the staff. The column will run a couple of days per week.

“He’ll be breaking news, analyzing the fissures of a bank town under strain and how it goes forward, illuminating the characters behind Charlotte’s rise and fall and rise,” said Scott. A start date for the column has not yet been determined, but will be determined in the next couple of weeks.

Stodghill had been a writer for the Sunday business section at the Times until he left the paper in December 2007 to become editorial director of six magazines published by the Observer. Before that, he had been a senior editor at Fortune Small Business.

Stodghill graduated from the University of Missouri in 1986. He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University and worked at BusinessWeek from 1989 to 1997. He was the Time magazine Midwest bureau chief as well.

Stodghill is also the author of “Redbone: Money, Malice and Murder in Atlanta” (HarperCollins, 2007), and co-author of “No Free Ride,” former U.S. Congressman and NAACP president Kweisi Mfume’s best-selling memoir (Ballantine Books, 1996).

DISCLOSURE: Stodghill and I worked together at BusinessWeek from 1993 to 1994.