NY Times names Asia business editor

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out an announcement to the staff Thursday naming Carlos Tejada as its Asia business editor.

The note states:

Carlos Tejada has been The Journal’s China news editor in Beijing since 2011, and was previously based in Hong Kong as deputy bureau chief and Asia news editor. He will work with Gerry Doyle and Phil Pan in directing our report from Asia, making it both digitally competitive and thematically smart as we draw more international readers to The Times.

Carlos is well known and admired among our Asia crew. He was Paul Mozur’s editor when Paul was based in Beijing.  Paul describes Carlos as “the heart of the WSJ bureau” and “a tireless editor who has the rare capacity to remain jolly despite spearheading a complete rewrite of a feature at midnight.”

Carlos started at The Journal as a reporter in Dallas covering spot news, oil and leveraged buyouts, before moving to New York as an editor. He grew up in Arizona, but says he always dreamed of New York, where his parents met (she an English teacher from New Hampshire and he an immigrant from El Salvador who took her ESL class.)

“Utopians to differing degrees,” he says, “they raised their family at one point in a salvaged mobile home on the side of a remote hill. There were javelina in the creosote and scorpions in the kitchen sink, but no telephones and no neighbors. It was more fun than it sounds.”

Carlos studied journalism at the University of Kansas. His wife Nora is a photographer, and they have a 5-year-old son and 2-year-old daughter.