New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:
We’re pleased to announce that Dionne Searcey of the Wall Street Journal is coming to BizDay to write about the economy.
For the past four years, Dionne has been an investigative reporter for the Journal’s Page One enterprise team, and before that was the paper’s national legal correspondent and its telecom reporter. She has also worked at Newsday, the Seattle Times and Chicago Tribune.
Dionne contributed to an award-winning series in 2011 that examined the Social Security disability program, and most recently wrote a series about fraud in asbestos claims that was based on her exclusive access to a database of privileged legal and medical records. She has an eye for quirky angles and details that has made her a regular contributor to the Journal’s signature A-hed feature, including one about a convention of twins in Ohio where she revealed that fraternal twins suffer from an inferiority complex. “Some fraternal twins and their parents think identical twins have all the fun,” she wrote.
As these things go, Dionne is the mother of 6-year-old identical twin girls (and their older brother), is married to the climate change program director for the Wildlife Conservation Society (his office is near the sea lion pool at the Bronx Zoo) and grew up in a town in Nebraska that was so small that she signed her name at the grocery store instead of paying on the spot. “My kids’ Brooklyn elementary school is far bigger than the population of my entire hometown,” Dionne said.
Dionne studied journalism and French at the University of Nebraska. and took her first big-city job as a cop reporter for the City News Bureau of Chicago. “I arrived at my first murder scene on my Chicago crime beat after being raised in Nebraska where police checks on barking dogs still make my hometown newspaper,” she said.
Dionne will join Nelson Schwartz and Shaila Dewan in covering the national economy later this month. Barking dogs beware.
