WSJ adds seven editorial staffers

Wall Street Journal business editor Jamie Heller sent out the following announcement on Friday:

Hello,

I’m thrilled to share news about new arrivals, roles and opportunities in corp.

Brianna Abbott has joined the Health & Science bureau in New York, focusing on medicine and science. An intern with us this spring, Brianna immediately distinguished the Journal with coverage on declining birth rates, the lunar eclipse including a crash ahed, and a story about antibiotic-resistant bacteria. She has made herself invaluable on breaking news from black holes to the measles outbreaks, and you might also know her byline from this ahed about cats ignoring people. Brianna is a graduate of the Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program at New York University and has written for Nature Medicine, Scholastic and Spectrum.

Ben Foldy is joining the Detroit bureau, covering auto industry regulations, safety and advanced technologies as well as U.S. operations of foreign auto makers. Ben was most recently an intern at Bloomberg News, and he also interned at the Financial Times. At Bloomberg, in a widely read story, he crunched numbers that showed job cuts and slowed lending at banks as they benefited from lowered tax rates. He holds graduate degrees in political science and journalism. The New York Financial Writers’ Association recently recognized Ben’s work with a 2019 scholarship award.

Heather Haddon is the new restaurants reporter in Chicago, taking on the beat after superb work as our food retail reporter. In that role, Heather regularly delivered scoops and enterprise on Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods as well as the woes of Kroger and other grocers. She was a lead reporter on our delivery series this year and has developed sub-beats readers love, including on meal kits and milk.

Sebastian Herrera is joining the San Francisco bureau as a tech news reporter with a focus on Amazon. Sebastian, who will work closely with Dana Mattioli, has been a business and technology reporter at the Austin American-Statesman, where he’s broken a variety of stories and has covered Amazon’s takeover of Whole Foods and the HQ2 saga. Before the Statesman, Sebastian worked as a metro reporter at the Houston Chronicle.

Heather Somerville is joining the San Francisco bureau to cover venture capital and startups. A veteran on this beat, Heather has covered tech for the past four years at Reuters and before that at the San Jose Mercury News. Her recent work has included enterprising stories on internal turmoil at GM’s Cruise self-driving unit and how U.S. universities turned away from Huawei under government pressure. She has also covered education for the Fresno Bee and got her start in journalism at the Charlotte Observer.

Robert Wall is joining the San Francisco bureau as an editor. Robert for the past five years has had a terrific run as our aerospace and aviation reporter in London. He recently has been a crucial part of our global team covering the 737 MAX crashes and was the lead reporter on our graphic comparing the two accidents. Other coverage highlights include his stories on airlines’ efforts to make 17-hour flights tolerable, the demise of the jumbo jet and drones at airports. He spent his early reporting life covering the Pentagon before moving to Europe, where he worked for Aviation Week and then Bloomberg.

Liz Wollman is joining the San Francisco bureau as an editor. Liz comes to WSJ from Bloomberg where she headed its West Coast legal team, running a team of reporters and stringers covering everything from immigration policy to the courtroom battle between Uber and Google and the Apple-Qualcomm feud. Before she was promoted to that role two years ago, she spent five years on the deals team. A 12-year veteran of Bloomberg, she previously worked at Standard & Poor’s and MSNBC.com, and, before that, at Dow Jones Newswires.

New Openings: We also have several new openings. One is reporting on aerospace and aviation out of London (contact Chip Cummins). Another is covering business technology companies such as Microsoft, AWS and Salesforce, out of San Francisco (contact Jason Dean). We are also looking for a tech news editor, a job that’s part of the San Francisco bureau but based in New York (contact Jason Dean). In Chicago, we are looking for a reporter to cover food retail (contact Joanna Chung). And in New York, we are looking for a reporter, on a contract basis, to cover the early years of work life and getting started in your career (contact Lynn Cook). If you are interested or know anyone outside of this organization who might be, please let us know.

Kudos! Finally, congratulations go out to journalists in corp, graphics, other coverage areas and corners of this organization for several awards, including on the corp-related front for coverage of Elon Musk, GE, Steve Wynn, health costs, trade, the Southwest crash, the AT&T antitrust case and Amazon HQ2.

As always, if you are interested in what’s afoot in corp, please reach out!