Washington Post hires new business reporter

The following announcement was sent out Tuesday from Washington Post national economy and business editor Greg Schneider, deputy editor David Cho and economic policy correspondent Jim Tankersley:

We’re delighted to announce that Todd C. Frankel will join the Financial section from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, as a writer on the new digital data/policy/storytelling project.

Few journalists in the country today write as evocatively, on as wide a range of subjects, as Todd does. He’s taken readers on a detective’s search for the source of a mass shooter’s ammunition, across railroad crossings where trains kill pedestrians without so much as slowing down and into the heart of a tornado-ravaged town where residents swore mystical Butterfly People spared children from the twister.

“Perhaps if there is some tie there, some connection” his former editors wrote in a send-off email, summing up his work, “it’s that stories matter and the only thing that matters is figuring out how.”

Todd grew up here in Southwest D.C., earned an English degree at the University of Delaware and worked his way up a string of daily papers: The Gleaner in Henderson, Ky.; The Charleston Daily Mail in W.Va.; and The Herald in Everett, Wash. He joined the Post-Dispatch as an enterprise reporter in 2003. A few years ago, to keep his skills sharp, he asked to be assigned the Anheuser-Busch beat for a year. On the side he teaches journalism at Washington University in St. Louis.

His work has won several journalism awards, including a National Headliners Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award, both for feature writing. He was a Livingston Award finalist in 2006 and a member of a 2009 Pulitzer Prize finalist team for breaking news. His stories have been published in the Best Newspaper Writing book and in the “Next Wave” literary nonfiction anthology.

He will be joined here in Washington by his wife Stephanie Cordle (a Post-Dispatch photographer) and two young sons.

We’re counting on Todd to play an anchor role on the team led by Jim Tankersley, alongside Lydia DePillis and Jeff Guo. Please welcome him to the Post when he starts at the end of April.