LA Business Journal hires finance reporter, copy editor

The Los Angeles Business Journal has hired a new finance reporter and a new copy editor.

Pat Maio, the new finance reporter, will start on Sept. 28.

Maio has held various reporting and editorial management positions over the past three decades, having specialized in business and government reporting. He has covered major financial stories ranging from the S&L crisis to dot-com bust of the late ’90s, to electricity deregulation in California and the real estate meltdown during the Great Recession.

He has held reporting jobs with the San Diego Union-Tribune, Orange County Register, Dow Jones Newswires and newspapers and other publications in Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

He also has held business editor positions with several mid-size newspapers, including the San Bernardino Sun / Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, The Desert Sun in Palm Springs and the former North County Times in San Diego. He also was the bureau chief of the Dow Jones News Service in Los Angeles where he directed coverage of electricity deregulation in California and the western United States, and regularly contributed stories to the Wall Street Journal.

Kristen Becker, the new copy editor, will start on Sept. 17.

For the past three years, Becker has worked as a copy editor for Stars and Stripes in Washington. She designed the page layout for news pages for the daily print editions, and she copyedited news stories, both from national news sources and those written by Stars and Stripes reporters.

Becker previously was a copy editor for Inside.com and The Hill.

She holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of California Santa Cruz and a master’s degree from American University.