OPC names biz journalist Kranz as its executive director

Patricia Kranz, a business journalist who has worked for BusinessWeek, the New York Times and Reuters, has been named the new executive director of the Overseas Press Club of America.

She will start on March 27 and overlap with outgoing executive director Sonya Fry for several months.

Kranz was most recently at Reuters, where she was deputy editor of company news. She held that position from March 2012 to October 2013.

Before that, she spent a year at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, where she was vice president of investment management and client solutions.

From June 2007 to November 2010, she was deputy editor of the Sunday business section at the Times, where she conceptualized and edited weekly cover stories on a wide variety of business topics, including profiles of corporate chieftains and Wall Street financiers, real estate, fashion, retail and the financial crisis.

Kranz spent 11 years at BusinessWeek, including three years as its Moscow bureau chief and five years as the editor of its European edition. She was also national news editor.

She has degrees from the University of Michigan and from the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs.

The Overseas Press Club was founded in 1939 in New York by a group of foreign correspondents. The OPC is a professional organization of American journalists who are involved in international news coverage in both electronic and print media.