LA Times hires Loeb winner as new energy reporter

Ivan Penn, business reporter for the Tampa Bay Times for the past nine years, has resigned to accept a job covering energy for the Los Angeles Times.

His last day at the Florida paper will be June 12. He will start in Los Angeles on July 13.

“We’re excited that Ivan Penn will be joining the L.A. Times business staff this summer,” said Los Angeles Times business editor Kimi Yoshino in an email to Talking Biz News. “His dogged coverage of Duke Energy for the Tampa Bay Times caught our attention, and we know he’ll bring that same scrutiny to energy issues in California.”

A native of Washington, D.C., Penn joined the Florida paper in July 2006 after more than 12 years with the Baltimore Sun. Penn covers utilities, energy and consumer issues for the Times.

Last year, Penn won a Gerald Loeb Award in the beat reporting category for stories on the proposed Levy County nuclear complex and the broken Crystal River nuclear plant.

Penn’s reporting included a three-month-long economic analysis that compared the Levy project with a comparable natural gas facility, using thousands of pages of state and federal records. The reporting showed that a natural gas facility would be cheaper than the Levy plant over a 60-year period and under virtually any scenario. After the stories ran, Duke Energy permanently closed the Crystal River plant and halted construction on the Levy complex.

Penn, who is also a Loeb finalist this year, has also won a 2014 National Headliner Award, Society of American Business Editors and Writers Awards and several Green Eyeshade Awards from the southeastern U.S. chapter for the Society of Professional Journalists. His honors also include selection as a 2005-2006 John S. Knight Fellow at Stanford University and a 2013 Knight boot camp fellow on energy and climate at MIT.

He is a University of Maryland graduate who began his career at the Miami Herald.