Ken Meehan, editor in chief of Debtwire, sent out the following to the staff:
Hey everyone, I’d like to announce that Jon Berke is being promoted to Americas Editor at our sister product, Inframation. In the role, JB will be heading up the North American and Latin American reporting teams for Infra as they look to expand their coverage model and build out their impressive data offering. He will continue to be based here in our New York office and will now report into Tom Williams, the EIC of the Infragroup.
I couldn’t be happier for JB. And I think he will do very well in his new role. Actually, I’d bet money on it. Besides being an absolute Debtwire legend, JB is a close personal friend and fellow Jersey boy. We go way back. I had the privilege to start working with JB when we launched Debtwire North Am in January 2005. Back then, there were only four of us on the editorial desk and one analyst. We all joined on the same day and our job responsibilities were loosely defined by Richard Hall as deep dive reporting on screwed up companies. The rest we were meant to figure out. I’m not sure any of us actually knew what we were doing when we started, so we just hit the phones relentlessly and through a lot of trial and error (and a 2 scoops a day production minimum) we started to write the playbook for “forward looking intelligence” on restructuring situations. Much to our amazement, soon people actually wanted to pay us money for it.
So we worked harder. But no one outworked JB. He was an unstoppable restructuring scoop machine, with that booming voice and old school rolodex of contacts, the man was an inspiration to us all. He set the bar and showed us how real journalism got done. More recently, he’s been the Editor and driving force behind our profitable expansion into the middle market, and over the years a whole generation of top class journos both here and in other news organizations successfully launched their careers under his tutelage. I can think of no higher compliment.
JB will officially begin his new role in early January (we plan to start the replacement vetting process shortly). So please join me in congratulating JB and wish him good luck! Though he’ll be over at Infra now, he’ll always be one of our own.
