Senior national reporter Emshwiller leaves WSJ

John Emshwiller, a senior national reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is among those leaving the paper this week due to its recent buyouts.

“I hope to do some further book writing after I leave the Journal and maybe some freelancing,” said Emshwiller in a message to Talking Biz News.

Along with Journal reporter Rebecca Smith, Emshwiller covered the fall of energy company Enron and was awarded a Gerald Loeb Award for those stories in 2002. Together, they wrote the book “24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America.”

In 2011, Emshwiller and Journal reporter Gary Fields received National Press Foundation’s Feddie, given for work showing the impact of Washington rules and regulations outside the Beltway. In a series called, “Federal Offenses,” they showed how little-known laws can snare the unwary – such as the father and son who were arrested and fined for trying to find (but not finding) arrowheads on federal land.

Smith and Fields also left earlier this month via the buyout offer.

In 2014, Emshwiller and Journal reporter Jeremy Singer-Vine were Pulitzer Prize finalists for their reports and searchable database on the nation’s often overlooked factories and research centers that once produced nuclear weapons and now pose contamination risks.

He is also the author of  “Scam Dogs And Mo-Mo Mamas: Inside the Wild and Woolly World of Internet Stock Trading.”

Emshwiller, who spent most of his career covering white-collar crime, is a University of California-Berkeley graduate.