SmartMoney.com announces staff

Although Dow Jones & Co. announced last month that it was closing SmartMoney‘s print publication, the website lives on.

Raju Narisetti, who is the managing editor of WSJ.com and oversees the online operations of SmartMoney, sent out the following staff announcements on Wednesday:

We are delighted to announce the expansion of SmartMoney.com with several additions to its news team. All are part of our goal to expand the brand’s digital reach as we continue to deliver our fresh and up-to-the-minute personal finance approach to advice and news, at SmartMoney.com as well as to personal finance readers of MarketWatch.com

Matt Heimer joined SmartMoney as a staff reporter in 2000, and as a senior writer occupied the coveted “weird features” slot in the mid-2000s. He became the magazine’s deputy editor in 2008. Previously, Matt worked at the media-criticism magazine Brill’s Content, where he spent six months as its only online columnist. Prior to that, he was a Knight Fellow in Journalism and Law at Yale Law School. He’s a native of San Francisco and a graduate of Yale College.

An invaluable member of SmartMoney for her ability to catch errors (and make her colleagues look great), Alice Hagge joined the magazine as copy chief in February 2010, having already served in that role at Conde Nast Portfolio and Portfolio.com, and earlier for Business 2.0 magazine and Business2.com. Alice is a graduate of the University of Georgia and holds a bachelor of arts in magazine journalism.

Before joining SmartMoney in 2011 as a staff writer, Ian Salisbury was a columnist for Dow Jones Newswires, where we wrote about mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and other more exotic investments. He was has degrees from Northwestern and Columbia Universities.

As a staff writer for the past two years, Charles Passy has written stories on everything from the challenges of predicting longevity to the oversized wallets Americans persist in carrying and the question of whether investment advisers could topple the brokerage industry. A regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog, Charles was previously a writer for Dow Jones Newswires and a food and arts writer for The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla.

For the past four years, Elizabeth O’Brien has covered bonds, funds and other investments, along with the odd story about boxing or luxury phones. She began writing about finance eight years ago at The Bond Buyer newspaper. Elizabeth is originally from Alexandria, Va., and holds a graduate degree in journalism from Columbia University and an undergraduate degree in comparative literature from Brown University.

Jennifer Wieczner started at SmartMoney as an intern in 2010, and quickly moved her way up to writing stories on such far-flung subjects as pension plans, oyster farming and stand-up paddle boarding. Jen graduated from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and also writes about society and cultural events for WSJ’s Greater New York section.

We are also happy to note that Brett Arends will be writing a weekly column for SmartMoney.com. Most recently, Brett, an inveterate bargain hunter, was writing features and a monthly column for SmartMoney.