Cohen joining NYTimes econ desk

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following staff announcement on Friday:

Our economics team is about to get a serious dose of culture.

We are pleased to announce that Patti Cohen will be joining BizDay as an economics reporter, replacing Shaila Dewan, who is moving to National.

Patti is accomplished as a reporter, editor and author. She has demonstrated with aplomb that covering culture at The Times involves graceful feature writing – and then some.  Her experience as a digger, investigator and parser of all things obtuse will be put to great use in unraveling the complexities behind our ever-maddening economy.

Last year, Patti won the Annette Giacometti Prize, which recognizes work that exposes counterfeiting in the art world.  Patti’s reporting focused on the gallery Knoedler, which was accused of selling masterpiece paintings that were fakes. Dozens of the paintings, it turns out, were the work of a 73-year-old copycat in Queens, who had managed to fool most everyone.

More recently, Patti teamed up with (former BizDayer) Graham Bowley to take on a very BizDay-like line of reporting: the messy intersection of the art world and the IRS. Her editor, Kevin Flynn, says Patti was practically giddy at the prospect of spending hours dissecting the tax code. “She is one of those rare reporters who reads every last page of a document,” Kevin says.

Patti was the founding editor of the erstwhile “Arts & Ideas” section, was the theater editor and a few years back wrote “In Our Prime,” a book about middle age that blends deep research and reporting on culture, economics and psychology.   A graduate of Cornell and Princeton, her life before The Times included work at Rolling Stone, The Washington Post and Newsday.

She starts next month.