MLex hires CQ Roll Call’s Ota to cover taxes

MLex’s US Tax Watch has added longtime Washington journalist Alan K. Ota as a reporter covering taxes and the Internal Revenue Service.

Ota joins MLex US Tax Watch from CQ Roll Call, where he gained extensive experience over two decades covering Congress and federal agencies, including the IRS. He has been at CQ Roll Call since 1997.

He graduated with a degree in sociology from the University of California at Berkeley and was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

He replaces Kat Lucero, who has moved to a new beat covering international trade for MLex Market Insight, a global regulatory newswire owned by LexisNexis.

MLex US Tax Watch launched earlier this year. It covers the IRS as an institution — its people, budget, mission and challenges, along with its successes and failures — rather than tax policy and regulation.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.