Chicago Tribune’s Yerak hired by WSJ

Becky Yerak

Becky Yerak, a business reporter at The Chicago Tribune for nearly 14 years, has been hired by The Wall Street Journal.

Yerak will be part of the Journal team covering bankruptcy court. She will be based in Wilmington, Delaware.

At the Tribune, Yerak had been covering banking, private equity, and property and casualty insurance. Before joining the Tribune in 2003, she was a business reporter for the Detroit News, the Plain Dealer, the Palm Beach Post and Orlando Business Journal.

In October 2015, she won a Chicago Journalists Association award for technology reporting. Earlier in the year, three of her stories were nominated for Lisagor awards by Chicago Headline Club, including two in the “Best Business or Consumer Reporting” category; she won one.

A year earlier, she won a Lisagor for “best technology reporting.”

The Cleveland-area native has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Ohio State University.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.