Washington Post biz reporter Merle switches to features

Renae Merle

Washington Post executive features editor Liz Seymour, features deputy editor David Malitz, features deputy editor Mitch Rubin and senior editor for style Hank Stuever sent out the following announcement::

We are thrilled to announce that Renae Merle will be joining Features as an assignment editor on the Style GA team.

Renae has had a robust career as a business reporter and editor at The Post for nearly 20 years. She recently launched the Road to Recovery vertical, for which she received the Publisher’s Award after covering how the country was inching its way out of the pandemic. She has also written about the 2008 housing crash, white-collar crime and defense programs that were over budget.

During four years in New York covering Wall Street, Renae wrote about short sellers wishing the worst for Tesla, the financial industry’s cozy relationship with the Trump administration and how payday lenders schemed to use Black churches to shield them from criticism. She’s written more stories than she can remember chronicling Wells Fargo’s struggle to stay on the right side of regulators after opening millions of fake accounts customers didn’t want and mistakenly foreclosing on hundreds of people. At the beginning of the pandemic, Renae turned her attention to the fate of unemployed workers struggling to pay rent and navigating a complicated eviction system even some judges struggle to understand.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.