LA Times hires WSJ’s Malas as deputy business editor

Los Angeles Times business editor Ben Muessig made the following announcement on Wednesday:

We are thrilled to announce that Nour Malas has joined the Los Angeles Times as a deputy editor for Business. In her new role, Malas will lead a team focused on income inequality and help develop strategy for the department.

In more than a decade at the Wall Street Journal, Malas served as an international correspondent, a West Coast economics reporter and an editor on the health and science team. Based in the Middle East, Malas reported on the financial crisis in the Gulf states before moving on to cover the Arab Spring, the rise and fall of Islamic State and the refugee crisis. In Syria, Malas’ reporting pieced together a pattern of chemical attacks by the Assad regime to show how global indifference helped fuel government aggression against opposition. She was among the first reporters to reach Raqqa as Islamic State advanced, and covered the takeover of Mosul on the ground.

In 2017, Malas moved to California and took on a business beat, writing about wealth inequity and how Silicon Valley companies have reshaped regional housing markets, among other topics. Malas was selected as a fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University in the class of 2020 to study how a changing American workforce impacts economic inequality. After spending some time at the business school there, she diverged from her original plan of study to also focus on digital platform strategy and the news business.

Most recently, she served as a news editor on the Wall Street Journal’s health and science team, focusing on, what else, the pandemic.