CNBC.com managing editor Jeffrey McCracken sent out the following on Wednesday:
I am happy to announce a series of newsroom changes to CNBC.com. These moves will give our much-valued editors new opportunities and editorial challenges, along with fresh reporting teams.
To start the moves, Christina Cheddar-Berk will shift over to Pro, our growing investor subscription service, working as an editor for John Melloy’s team. In this role, she will manage our investing trends coverage, a new part of the ever-expanding Pro group, and dive into analysis of specific companies or industries that may be of interest to investors.
Christina, an integral part of CNBC since 2006, has been instrumental in our company news coverage, steering beats such as retail and media. She is also a master of helping teach and train young journalists in our craft. As part of this new position, Christina will work with John on hiring for the section, and it will also give her time to get back to writing more — an opportunity she has been seeking for some time.
As Christina moves to Pro, the consumer news group will merge with both our transportation and media/entertainment teams to create a bigger company news team led by Mike Calia. Mike has done a stellar job with our political coverage for more than four years, guiding readers through the 2018 and 2020 elections, and his news judgment and ability to manage a range of news topics are inspiring. Mike’s prior experience from his time at Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal where he wrote and edited stories on corporate earnings, sports and entertainment will help in his new role.
With Mike’s move, Dawn Kopecki will now oversee the politics team, in addition to the health-care team she’s been managing for two years. Pairing politics and health under one manager makes sense, given the importance of the CDC, the FDA and other government entities to our health-care coverage. Dawn has helped the team stay ahead of a mountain of news on vaccines, mask mandates and Covid variants. I have no doubt she will show the same tenacity with our thriving politics coverage as we head into midterm elections and beyond by harnessing her more than 25 years of reporting and editing experience across a range of topics in business, finance and politics.
As part of this move, Jacob Pramuk is going to become an editor for the politics team, helping Dawn with all of the wonderful stories this team produces. Jacob has been with CNBC.com since 2014, most recently as a politics reporter.
Along with these editor-level shifts, I also want to announce three new hires for CNBC.com.
First, I am happy to announce the hiring of Michele Theodore as a news editor on our hotseat team, which oversees the CNBC.com website, reporting to Elisabeth Cordova. Known as the air traffic controllers of the newsroom, the hotseats help decide which articles to play prominently on the homepage and app, plus coordinate breaking news across the teams. Michele previously served as a copy editor at ISS Media, working on three magazines that cover the retirement plan industry. Before that, she spent three years as a copy editor at the Richmond Times-Dispatch in Richmond, Virginia.
She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and Spanish from Ohio State University. She is a native of Lima, Ohio, but now lives in New York City. Michele enjoys seeing live jazz with her husband and, thanks to her grandmother, has taken up crocheting.
In another new hire for the newsroom, John Rosevear is joining CNBC.com to cover the burgeoning electric vehicle beat. John will cover old and new automakers as they grapple with a zero-emissions future. He will report to Mike Calia as part of the transportation team. John comes to us from The Motley Fool, where he spent nearly 15 years, ending his tenure as a senior automotive reporter. While there, he focused on the rise of electric and self-driving vehicles for an audience of (mostly) retail investors.
Not surprisingly for an automotive reporter, John was born in Michigan. But — plot twist! — he grew up in the seaside town of Barrington, Rhode Island. He graduated from Cornell University with a degree in government. John currently resides in Berlin, Massachusetts (not too far from Boston). He enjoys hiking, playing guitar, tinkering with old cars and FaceTiming with his three college-age kids. He looks forward to moving to New York in the not-too-distant future.
Lastly, I am happy to announce that Spencer Kimball, currently serving as an editor for our politics team, is taking over our health-care reporting. Spencer has been doing double duty these last few months, attending to some editing and hustling on a lot of health-care stories. He will now focus solely on the health-care field, from pandemic coverage to vaccine mandates and beyond. Spencer, who will report to Dawn Kopecki, has put his news junkie energy to good use in his roles at CNBC, from overseeing our weekend news coverage to assisting on our politics team.
We believe this new editorial structure will help us continue to grow our reach and produce even more smart, high-quality coverage for our readers. We should all take great pride in what we do. Thanks to all of you for contributing to our incredible success.
I hope you will join me in congratulating Christina, Mike, Dawn, Jacob and Spencer on their new roles, and welcoming Michele and John to the team.
We will have a call at 4 p.m. ET today to congratulate everyone and answer any questions you may have.
