CNBC hires two new reporters

Business news channel CNBC announced Tuesday that Kayla Tausche and Margaret Popper will join the network.

Tausche will be a general assignment reporter covering corporate finance and deals, and Popper will be a senior producer helping oversee the network’s banking and finance coverage.  Both will contribute to CNBC.com.

“Covering banking and corporate finance is at the heart of what CNBC does best,” said Nikhil Deogun, managing editor, CNBC Business Day programming, in a statement.  “The addition of both Kayla and Margaret will immediately add value to CNBC’s viewers and users, and continue to enhance our dominant position as the leader in business news.”

Before joining CNBC, Tausche was based in London as the assistant editor of DealReporter, a Financial Times-owned publication geared toward merger arbitrage investors.  Previously, she was a New York-based journalist at DealReporter, where her M&A coverage consistently broke stories on high-profile deals like the takeover of Cadbury, the unraveling of Hunstman-Hexion and the leveraged buyout of Interactive Data Corp.

She has appeared frequently on CNBC’s Business Day programming to discuss M&A. Prior to DealReporter, Tausche worked on the companies desk at Bloomberg News, covering earnings in the consumer and retail industry under a fellowship from the Steamboat Foundation.  She began her journalism career at the Brussels bureau of the Associated Press.  Tausche holds a bachelor’s degree in business journalism and international politics from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  She was an Ameel J. Fisher scholar in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication.

Popper comes to CNBC from Bloomberg TV where she was the banking and finance producer, responsible for booking guests and producing stories on the finance beat. She started in television as an on-air reporter covering the banking beat.  Popper jumped to television after several years on the finance team at Bloomberg’s news service. Before joining Bloomberg, Popper was an associate economics editor at BusinessWeek magazine.

Prior to working for the magazine, Popper was at BusinessWeek Online where she covered investing, finance, capital markets and economics. While at BusinessWeek, she appeared as a guest on ABC, CNN, CNNfn, and CNBC. As a freelance journalist, Popper covered banks, investing and finance from Madrid and London for BusinessWeek, Euromoney, Institutional Investor and Investment Dealers’ Digest. Popper started her career as a banker working at Chemical Bank, Kidder Peabody and Dean, Witter Reynolds. Popper earned a master’s degree in business administration from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.  She also holds a bachelor’s degree from Yale University.

DISCLOSURE: Tausche was one of my students.