LA Times hires Kitroeff to cover California economy

Los Angeles Times business editor Kimi Yoshino sent out the following announcement to the staff:

I’m pleased to welcome Natalie Kitroeff, our new California economy reporter. Natalie comes to us from Bloomberg, where she covered higher education and student debt for BusinessWeek. Prior to that she worked as a researcher at the Council on Foreign Relations (where she learned she did not want to be a policy wonk) and as an editorial assistant at the New York Times (where she fell in love with journalism). At the New York Times, Natalie did reporting and fact checking for op-ed columnists Nick Kristof and Charles Blow and squeezed in as many freelance pieces as she could.

Some of her favorite stories include: the predatory tactics of a non-profit student loan monitor, whether dismal bar pass rates are a sign that lawyers are getting dumber, how education loans amassed by parents may be the next crisis for the elderly, and the troubling disparity in the MBA payoff for women and men.

She graduated from Princeton University with a B.A. in international affairs and spent four months studying abroad at the University of Havana.

Natalie has Greek, Canadian and American citizenship, roots for mainly losing sports teams (the Philadelphia Eagles) and likes burritos more than tacos.