Sterngold joins SmartMoney magazine

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

SmartMoney magazine editor Jonathan Dahl made the following staff announcement on Wednesday afternoon:

I’m happy to announce that James Sterngold, an award-winning former New York Times reporter, will be joining SmartMoney as a senior writer, starting Dec. 5. He’ll be focusing on investigative stories and other features, as part of our continuing effort to offer more in-depth, sophisticated personal-finance stories. He will also help out on some editing, sharing his reporting knowledge and mentoring skills on team projects.

Jim comes uniquely qualified for these tasks, described by one longtime Journal editor as a “byline you feared.” He spent 18 years at The New York Times, serving as the paper’s lead Wall Street reporter, and later its Tokyo Bureau Chief, before heading to Los Angeles to cover business, culture, and national affairs. There, Jim earned a bevy of reporting awards and contributed to the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage of the events of 9/11. After the Times, Jim became national affairs correspondent and Los Angeles bureau chief for the San Francisco Chronicle, before finally coming to his senses and returning to New York.

Until recently, Jim was firing up the presses at Bloomberg News/Businessweek, where he served as a roving feature writer, covering all things financial. His piece on the compensation of former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld (“Who Cares About Another $200 million?”)  won a prize from the Foreign Press Association. And along the way, Jim, a dad of two and married to Mireya Navarro of The New York Times, wrote a well-received book on one of America’s most storied and now-defunct brokerage houses, E. F. Hutton.

He will report to Cliff Leaf. Please join me in welcoming him to the SmartMoney team.