NYTimes biz news desk hires two new reporters from FT

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy and an editor for Dealbook Jeffrey Cane sent out the following staff hire announcement:

Great news from the Finance/DealBook cluster: We will be adding two new reporters this summer, both from The Financial Times, as we replenish our ranks — and then some — in our continued mission to offer our readers the smartest and most insightful Wall Street coverage around.

We’re pleased to introduce our newest colleagues:

David Gelles, who has been a formidable competitor as the FT’s New York-based reporter covering mergers and acquisitions. David first caught Andrew Ross Sorkin‘s eye for his many scoops, and his smart analysis of big corporate deals. But David, who has been at the FT for five years, has broad experience beyond mergers and acquisitions. He spent two years covering technology from San Francisco, and was also the paper’s U.S. media and marketing correspondent. He has won various awards, including a SABEW for a FT Weekend Magazine piece based on a jailhouse interview with Bernie Madoff.

In his earlier years as a freelancer, David wrote for a host of prominent publications, including a piece for our own Home section — “Down and Dirty” — on the earthen floor movement (people who prefer dirt over hardwood or carpeting) and a piece on mountain unicycling for Sports.

David will spend the summer finishing a book that charts the impact of Eastern wisdom — meditation, yoga and more — on Western business, before starting here after Labor Day. He studied philosophy at Boston University as an undergraduate, and journalism as a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped develop a program in entrepreneurial journalism. As for that book on Eastern wisdom? He also studied Buddhism in Bodh Gaya, India.

Alexandra Stevenson, who is a London-based reporter for the FT covering European markets. Alex started at the FT three years ago as a fellow in the paper’s South Asia bureau in New Delhi. She has been a writer for “beyondbrics,” the paper’s emerging markets blog, and has been a companies beat reporter in London.

A Canadian who was born in the United States, Alex has a special interest in China, where she studied at Peking University and worked at the now-defunct Asia Weekly Magazine and as a freelancer for various broadcast outlets. In the category of lessons-learned-working-for-an-authoritarian-regime: During a brief stint with China Radio International — the state broadcaster — she recorded a voice-over for a report on the financial crisis that played at the 2009 National Party Congress. But when she wanted to question party officials about building standards on the anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake, she was unceremoniously sidelined.

Alex has a bachelor’s in political science from McGill University in Montreal, and also studied Mandarin at Liaoning Normal University in Dalian, China. She will move to New York later this summer.