New NY Times biz reporter Nelson “never settles”

New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock sent out the following announcement on Monday:

We are delighted to introduce and welcome Eshe Nelson, our newest colleague to the Business team, as a reporter in London.

Eshe comes to us most recently from the Knight-Bagehot fellowship program at Columbia University, where she studied topics like corporate finance, economic models and narrative writing.

Before Columbia, she spent three years as an economics and markets reporter for Quartz in London, writing about European fiscal policy, sustainable finance, racial economic inequality and a bit about Brexit. And before that she was a markets reporter at Bloomberg, writing countless breaking stories every day and covering the 5.6 trillion euro European repo market.

Awards? Her 2018 series Remaking Economics won her Britain’s Wincott Young Financial Journalist of the Year award and across the ocean earned an honorable mention in the SABEW Best in Business awards that year, too.

Her byline first appeared in her hometown of Reading, about 25 miles outside London. The Reading Evening Post wanted a new voice for its pages, and asked 14-year-old Eshe, a member of the town’s youth committee, to submit an article. She wrote about the rising outrage among teenagers and parents over the bus system’s new rule requiring young riders to carry ID cards at the cost of 5 pounds each. The article hit a chord – within days, the bus company gave up on the ID card scheme. Her editor wisely gave her a monthly column after that.

Dealbook editor Jason Karaian worked with Eshe at Quartz and is one of many people who told us to hire her as soon as we could.

“Eshe never settles,” Jason said. “She always makes the extra call, asks the extra question, reads the extra report and digs up the extra data. It shows in the depth and nuance of her reporting on economics, which has been far ahead of the curve when it comes to the field’s struggles with gender, race and outdated models of how the economy actually works.”

It’s all true. She is constantly looking for that fascinating report, that piece of data, that last interview that nails a story. We look forward to her reporting on the inequities in Britain as it comes out of lockdown, and on the hidden fissures under the march of Brexit.