Houston Chronicle biz columnist Steffy quits

Loren Steffy, the business columnist for The Houston Chronicle, is leaving the paper to work for a Washington-based think tank.

Richard Connelly of the Houston Press writes, “Steffy is teaming with some former colleagues from Bloomberg to put out white papers and op-ed columns for a Washington, D.C. think tank, and Langford is headed to the bucolic surroundings of New Jersey to become New York City-based public radio WNYC’s investigative reporter for the Garden State.

“Both of them tell Hair Balls they had no intentions of leaving the Chron until the specific opportunities came up.

”I had a really good opportunity to work with some close friends, and I felt I couldn’t pass it up,’ Steffy says. ‘That said, it wasn’t an easy decision. I have really loved writing a column for the Chronicle, and I still believe that there is no better city in which to write a business column than Houston.'”

Read more here. He is the author of “Drowning in Oil: BP and the Reckless Pursuit of Profit” published by McGraw-Hill in 2010 and “The Man Who Thought Like a Ship,” published by Texas A&M University Press in April 2012.

Steffy is a three-time finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, the business news equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize. Since joining the Chronicle in 2004, Steffy’s columns have received awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, press clubs of Dallas and Houston, the Associated Press Managing Editors and the Hearst Corporation. He received the Chronicle’s Jesse Award for Commentator of the Year in 2006 and 2011.

Here is a Q&A that Talking Biz News did with Steffy about his BP book.