Dallas Morning News hires Walters for money beat

Dallas Morning News business editor Paul O’Donnell sent out the following on Thursday:

All,

We’re pleased to announce the return of former intern Natalie Walters to our newsroom as one of our new business reporting hires.

She’ll rejoin our team on the newly-created money beat.

Natalie’s work last summer with the business team stood out, allowing her to showcase the reporting and data skills she honed while earning her master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University.

She led our coverage of the initial PPP disclosures and ended up writing about several of Dallas’ notable civic leaders, including the Rev. Robert Jeffress and Omni hotel chain owner Robert Rowling. And she profiled (with little cooperation from the subject) the controversial hotelier Monty Bennett.

She also captured how the pandemic made us all more conscious of how we appear on Zoom,  compiled our annual ranking of executive compensation and told the story of a retired couple who gave up their stimulus checks to help a struggling Plano costume shop owner pay his workers.

And our readers took notice. Her stories resulted in 163 digital conversions and she influenced more than 1,000 others. For the summer months, she ranked fourth in the newsroom for most conversions.

Natalie’s background includes five years of reporting experience in New York at business news sites The Street, Business Insider and Motley Fool. Since earning her master’s degree in December, she has been working at the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier’s entry into the Greenville, S.C., market.

Please join me in congratulating Natalie on her return to the DMN. You can hit her up by email at nataliewalters747@gmail.com or on Twitter. She starts with us May 3.

This is the second move related to our expansion of business coverage. The third will be coming soon.