Toonkel named media reporter for Reuters

Eric Effron, editor charge of company news for Reuters, sent out the following announcement on Friday:

We are delighted to announce that Jessica Toonkel will be joining the Companies team as our U.S. media reporter, effective Oct. 1. She’ll be based in New York and report to Peter Henderson. Jessica brings to this assignment a stellar track record as a true digger.

She started at Reuters in 2011 on the Wealth Management team, where she produced a series of scoops about BlackRock. She joined the M&A team in December 2012 and was part of a group that was a finalist for Reuters Journalist Team of the Year in 2013, for coverage of the Facebook IPO.

She moved to the Markets team last September to cover funds and investing, where, true to form, she continued to break news, including scoops on the departure of Bill Gross from Pimco. Before joining Reuters in 2011, Jessica worked at a number of niche publications including American Lawyer, American Banker and Crain’s InvestmentNews.

She also spent a couple of years in Berlin, reporting on e-commerce for FinancialNetAlert, and racked up several journalism awards along the way. In her new beat, Jessica will focus on digital advertising and the many ways it is transforming and challenging old and new media alike. The terrain is rich, as the industry grapples with such issues as whether ads can be super-targeted without invading privacy and television’s flailing efforts to connect with millennials.

Jessica also is the co-author of “The Stay-At Home Dad Handbook”(penned before her two children arrived.) And if she seems to be in a rush all the time, that could be because she’s a competitive runner, having finished three half-marathons.

Please join us in wishing Jessica well on her new assignment.