NYT names new economy reporter

New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia sent out the following announcement to the business news desk staff:

We’re pleased to announce that Shaila Dewan will join Business Day and our team of reporters covering the economy.

Shaila, who most recently was a National correspondent in Atlanta, is a talented reporter and wordsmith who has demonstrated great range in her career at The Times. She has a knack for spotting great stories and telling them through people, skills that will be very valuable as she works with Catherine Rampell and Motoko Rich on the economics beat, reporting to Winnie O’Kelley. The economy is one the biggest stories anywhere, and explaining policy and enlightening readers about what is going on and what it means to them is central to the paper’s overall coverage of what’s happening in America.

As a National reporter, Shaila produced smart stories about our economic times, writing about how the well-to-do were cutting back on conspicuous consumption after the financial meltdown; profiling a Georgia town that lost its bank; examining the wave of furloughs, voluntary and otherwise, meant to stave off layoffs; and chronicling Charlotte’s fall from banking grace as rivals Bank of America and Wachovia teetered on the edge.

Shaila –  pronounced SHY-lah (though she’s not shy) – joined The Times in March 2000 on the Metro desk.  She helped covered 9/11 and ended with a two-year stint in the cop shop (“my favorite,” she says), where she wrote about declining crime, floating bodies, advancements in forensic science and the death of two undercover officers in a Staten Island gun deal gone bad.

In 2005, she joined National. “Six months later, Hurricane Katrina hit, setting the course for my reporting for months and years to come. In addition to covering the usual Southern mix of race, politics, criminal justice travesties and civil rights history, I helped cover the Virginia Tech shooting, the mine explosion in West Virginia, the bizarre saga of Amy Bishop, the professor who went postal in Alabama, and, of course, the BP oil spill,” she reports.

Shaila originally is from Houston, where she began her reporting career at the Houston Press, an investigative newsweekly.