Reuters names editor in charge of regulation coverage

Kerry Van Hall, the Washington news editor and acting bureau chief for Reuters, sent out the following announcement on Monday:

Hi, we’re very excited to announce that Soyoung Kim will be joining the Washington bureau as our Editor in Charge of Regulation, a newly created position. Soyoung, a scoop master with a boundless curiosity, will lead coverage of the intersection between Corporate America and Washington. That includes financial regulation, tech policy, health policy, antitrust, defense contractors, transportation policy, lobbying, and other policy areas that impact the private sector.

Soyoung will officially start the job on Feb. 1 from New York, and will spend two weeks transitioning from the M&A Team to the Regulation Team. On Feb. 16, she will be leading the Regulation Team full-time, and will relocate to Washington soon thereafter.

Soyoung began her career at Reuters in Seoul in 2005 and moved to Detroit in 2008 in the middle of the great auto industry restructuring. She wrote a number of stories chronicling the turnaround of companies such as General Motors, producing special reports and consistently breaking news. She took the auto industry by storm, even without knowing how to drive when she first arrived in Detroit!

She moved to New York in 2010 to cover M&A, and quickly became a beat machine, producing 50-100 exclusives per year. Among the highlights:  news that Verizon Communications was preparing a $100 billion bid to take full control of Verizon Wireless from Britain’s Vodafone, and that US Airways and American Airlines were nearing a $11 billion merger. She took on the role of M&A EIC in 2013 and has since led a team that breaks news almost every day. Her team won the 2013 Reuters Journalist of the Year Award in the reporting team of the year category.

Before coming to Reuters, Soyoung studied journalism in Korea and the Netherlands, and started her journalism career in 2003 at the Korea Herald.

On the weekends, she likes to binge watch TV shows and spend time with her husband who sometimes grumbles she’s married to work during weekdays. She also has, by her own admission, a “big sweet tooth”, and for the benefit of others around her, a sixth sense about cakes or candies in the newsroom.