NY Times hires Tankersley as tax and economics reporter

Jim Tankersley is joining the Washington bureau of the New York Times as a tax and economics reporter.

Tankersley comes to The Times from Vox, where he edited the policy and politics team, including coverage of the economy, health care, immigration, Congress and the White House.

Before that he spent four years at The Washington Post as the paper’s economic policy correspondent, and three years in a similar role at National Journal.

Tankersley has written extensively about the stagnation of the American middle class, the decline of economic opportunity in wide swaths of the country and how policy changes in Washington have exacerbated those trends over the past few decades.

He came to Washington 10 years ago to join the D.C. bureau of the Chicago Tribune, where he covered Congress and the 2008 presidential campaign. He started his career with stints at The Oregonian, The Rocky Mountain News and The Toledo Blade, primarily covering politics.

At The Blade he was a member of the Coingate team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. He and a Blade colleague won the 2007 Livingston Award for Young Journalists for a series of stories demonstrating how and why the Ohio economy declined so dramatically over the course of a generation.

A native of McMinnville, Ore., Tankersley is a Stanford graduate.