St. Louis paper names new biz editor

Brian Thevenot is the new business editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, according to sources at the paper.

He replaces Todd Stone, who left earlier this year to become business editor at the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.

Thevenot had been the managing editor of the Texas Tribune. Before that, he spent a dozen years at The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, most recently as special projects editor. As part of a team that covered the worst of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, Thevenot contributed multiple bylines to two winning entries for Pulitzer Prizes in breaking news and public service.

His Katrina reporting also won the Mongerson Prize for Investigative Reporting on the News from Northwestern University, and the Medal of Valor from the National Association of Minority Media Executives. In 2009, an eight-part series Thevenot edited, chronicling the investigation into an all-too-routine murder of a New Orleans teenager, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in local reporting.

In 2005, just before Katrina, Thevenot spent a month reporting on Louisiana soldiers in Baghdad and produced a three-part deadline narrative about squad of soldiers hit by a deadly roadside bomb, which was a finalist for Livingston Award. In 2003, he won a National Headliner Award for education reporting for his 2002 five-part narrative tracking an eighth-grader’s struggle to pass Louisiana’s high-stakes standardized test.

Before joining the Times-Picayune, Thevenot worked as a suburban reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer. Born in Washington, D.C., and raised in Oklahoma City, Thevenot has a degree in journalism from the University of Missouri-Columbia.