Reuters names team leader for funds team

Carmel Crimmins, financial services editor for the Americas at Reuters, sent out the following staff announcement on Wednesday afternoon:

I am pleased to announce that Tim McLaughlin aka @MacMutual has been appointed Team Leader for the funds team in Boston. Tim will help shape our coverage of the mutual fund sector and the hedge fund industry working with Ross Kerber and Svea Herbst-Bayliss to produce enterprise stories that pack a punch.

Tim’s skill at mining company filings for scoops and weaving them into revelatory, entertaining stories resonates across the file.  For a Special Report about guns and politics he helped create a stock-trading algorithm.  Digging through energy company reports with Luc Cohen earlier this year, he revealed that oil and gas workers had not learned the lesson of Enron – continuing to load their retirement plans with company stock. And together with Ross and Svea,  he showed the hubris at work in Third Avenue ahead of the collapse of its junk bond fund, the biggest mutual fund failure since the financial crisis.

Tim was part of the Reuters team that was a Loeb Award finalist for a package of stories about the subprime crisis. A Reuters veteran of nearly 10 years,  he played a key role in covering the biggest story Boston has seen in the past decade, the 2013 Marathon bombing. During the manhunt for the bombers four days after the attack, Tim worked his way into the neighborhood where police were searching for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, providing vivid and critical details of the manhunt.

Tim has also worked  for the St Louis Post-Dispatch, Boston Herald and the Concord Monitor in New Hampshire. Highlights from his time at St Louis include landing the only interview with Kansas City serial killer Bob Berdella.  (Don’t look him up if you want to sleep tonight.) And he uncovered stock option backdating at a small defense company in St. Louis. Three former top executives at the company, including its chairman, were later convicted of crimes related to backdating.

A graduate of the Missouri School of Journalism, Tim likes to play tennis and Strat o Matic baseball in his spare time. He also enjoys building spreadsheets from scratch and is a Justin Timberlake super fan with the song “Mirrors” being a particular favourite.

Please join me in congratulating Tim.