Fortune writer leaving for New York Times

Nelson Schwartz, a senior writer for Fortune magazine, is leaving the bi-weekly business glossy for a job on the New York Times business desk, according to a memo posted Friday on the Romenesko blog.

In the memo, Sunday biz editor Timothy O’Brien wrote, “Nelson is a graceful writer, and a wide-ranging curiosity and a mature sense of balance and perspective embroider his work. He has covered Wall Street, the financial markets, energy, Eliot Spitzer’s legal crusades, oil and the Iraq war, executive profiteering, white-collar job angst, government contracting, steel, the Israeli security state, American Express, the Argentine economy, and the excesses of the dot.com boom.

“Nelson has the intellectual breadth and discipline to write about almost anything he chooses or anything we choose to put in front of him, and he carries all of that off with first-rate journalistic aplomb. We’re looking forward to having him as a pillar of the narrative storytelling we’re continuing to showcase on the front page of Sunday Business. As Joe Nocera says of Nelson: ‘He’s aggressive, hates to get beat, can smell a good story, and doesn’t like to take months to get it into print (unlike a certain other Fortune writer now at the Times). He’s also a lot of fun.'”

Read more here.