NYT hires ex-BusinessWeek staffer for biz desk, Dealbook

New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia and Dealbook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin sent out the following staff announcement Tuesday afternoon:

We’re delighted to announce that Adrienne Carter, formerly a financial editor and a reporter at BusinessWeek, will be joining DealBook and Business Day as an editor.

Adrienne’s knowledge of finance, her high energy and her competitive spirit make her a good choice for DealBook’s early morning editor, the person who will get the report going each day and work closely with Andrew Sorkin, Jeff Cane and David Gillen to set the day’s agenda.

Adrienne worked for BusinessWeek from 2004 to early this year, leaving in March not long after it was acquired by Bloomberg to help develop and oversee an internal Web site for financial advisers at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney.

Her career has been focused largely on finance. After earning her B.A. in economics at Columbia, Adrienne worked for Money magazine for five years, initially as a writer and then as associate editor. She joined BusinessWeek as a correspondent in its Chicago bureau covering the food and finance industries. Among her stories were a smart, skeptical piece about biofuels, raising questions about whether ethanol was the best alternative to gasoline, and a nice profile of the turnaround at Miller Brewing.

Adrienne moved back to New York in 2007 to become deputy finance editor — just as the signs of the housing mortgage bust began appearing. Though she hadn’t covered Wall Street, she quickly impressed many people at the magazine. Adrienne took over the section as finance editor in 2008, in the depths of the financial crisis. She helped direct coverage of a variety of topics: the fraud at Stanford Financial, with one of her reporters breaking a big story in the magazine about investigations a week before the firm was shut down; the looming problems facing bond insurers that had backed mortgage-backed securities; and the financial problems of municipalities brought on by derivatives that Wall Street banks concocted and sold to them.

A finance geek at heart, Adrienne says she took the Series 7 exam just for fun, and is now a licensed stockbroker. When she’s not cramming for Finra exams, Adrienne enjoys coming up with new recipes (her specialty: braising). She is also an avid traveler. Before she starts at The Times in late November, she is headed off to South Africa, where she plans to ride an elephant and sample the local wines (not at the same time, she promises).