Kate Kelly to join NY Times biz desk

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

You may know her for coverage of hedge funds on CNBC. Or for having won multiple awards for hard-hitting finance reporting at The Wall Street Journal. Or for being the best-selling author of a book on the final days of Bear Stearns.

Kate Kelly is a business journalist extraordinaire, and I’m excited to announce that she is coming to The Times.

Kate will be joining our team covering Wall Street, a beat she knows well from a decade as an investigative reporter at The Journal and the past six years as an on-air reporter at CNBC.  Kate won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists for her three-part series in 2008 about the collapse of Bear Stearns. She also shared beat reporting honors from the Loebs that same year with our own Sue Craig, among others.

Kate’s Wall Street work has also been honored by Scripps Howard and the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. She won a “Best in Business” award for explanatory journalism for her CNBC coverage in 2010 of how Twitter has revolutionized trading. The judges praised her  “exceptionally clear writing and presentation.”

Kate has also worked at Time magazine and the New York Observer, where she wrote the weekly residential real-estate column, “Manhattan Transfers.” A native of Washington, D.C., she graduated from Columbia with a degree in history.

Journalism was the career that almost wasn’t for Kate. Growing up, she says, she was most interested in classical singing. She took voice lessons, attended music camp, had an opera subscription in high school, and eventually applied to conservatories for college. “A freak bout of mononucleosis my senior year meant that I couldn’t study or prepare for auditions, and I ultimately flubbed the entrance exams,” Kate says. “It seemed like a career in journalism, which had been my backup plan, was foreordained.”

The mother of three children under the age of eight, Kate offers this secret for staying centered in the hectic world of work and family: hot yoga.

“I proudly accomplished my first (and only) headstand last year,” she says, “when I was pregnant with my youngest daughter.”

Kate begins her New York Times headstand in early January.