WSJ expands economics news team

The following announcement was sent out Thursday by Washington bureau chief Gerald Seib and economics editor Neil King:

We’re delighted to announce new appointments and hires that will bring added heft and fresh skills to The Wall Street Journal’s expanding global economics team.

Sudeep Reddy is named deputy global economics editor, while Tim Aeppel is taking on an expanded role as the Journal’s senior economics correspondent.

Matt Stiles is joining us from NPR as a data reporter based in Washington, a move that will enliven and sharpen our abilities to unearth new data trends and bring complex policy stories to life.

And two great reporters have come on board: Nick Timiraos, Journal housing reporter extraordinaire, and Josh Zumbrun, until recently Bloomberg’s crack Fed reporter.

Sudeep Reddy’s appointment formalizes and widens a role he assumed last spring, when he joined the editing ranks and transformed our daily economics coverage for the digital era. Sudeep aligned our reporting teams into a single structure to deliver faster and smarter news content across all platforms. He will continue to play a key role in steering our coverage of U.S. and international economics and economic policy.

Since coming to the Journal in 2007, Sudeep has covered U.S. and international economics, economic policy, global trade and the world’s leading economic institutions including the Federal Reserve, Treasury, IMF and World Bank. He is respected by colleagues on every continent from his coverage of the global financial crisis, the euro crisis and international policy summits.

Sudeep came to us from The Dallas Morning News, where he served as an energy reporter in Texas and a Washington correspondent covering business topics in Congress and federal regulatory agencies. He graduated from Brown University with a degree in history and biomedical ethics.

Tim Aeppel, in his new role, will use his deft feel for the country and deep understanding of business in reporting on the many forces shaping the U.S. and global economies. He also will help formulate and steer major projects and leders within the broader economics team.

Tim brings to his new assignment an unmatched reputation for coverage of manufacturing and the industrial economy, as well as for his meticulous reporting and writing. All his skills served the global economics team well for the years he served as bureau chief, directing the New York economics group.

A native of bustling Loup City, Neb., Tim joined the Journal in 1989 to cover Germany—and, within weeks of his arrival, was witness to the fall of the Berlin Wall. He went on to chronicle the reunification of Germany and to become the Journal’s Europe-wide auto correspondent. After moving back to the U.S., he carved out a beat covering America’s factory floors. He is a graduate of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and of Principia College.

Matt Stiles’s arrival in the Washington bureau April 21 will mark a dramatic uptick in our abilities to unearth telling data on the U.S. and global economies, and to tell vivid graphical tales. He also will be sharing his arts with our political team.

New York magazine named Matt one of the country’s top 21 “new media innovators,” lauding the huge databases he assembled during his time with the online Texas Tribune.  One tracked the ZIP codes and per capita incomes of the state’s top lottery buyers, while another dug into the details of all the state’s prison inmates.

Matt comes to us from NPR, where he served three years as one of the organization’s top data gurus and hatched many of its top visualization projects. One application he created on fracking in Pennsylvania was part of a package of drilling stories that won a DuPont-Columbia Award. He was also an arch trainer and mentor to others in the NPR newsroom, a flair he will bring with him to the Journal.

Matt covered cops and crime for four years at The Dallas Morning News, moved to The Houston Chronicle in 2005, and then worked as a reporter and news applications editor at The Texas Tribune before heading to NPR. He’s a graduate of the University of Texas at Arlington.

Nick Timiraos, who is wrapping up his service on the housing beat this month, will cover the full spectrum of issues shaping the economy.

Nick joined the Journal in 2006 as an intern in his native L.A. and did a stint for us on the 2008 campaign trail. He went on to earn his stripes as the nation’s top housing reporter. He covered the real estate sector throughout the housing bust and recovery, the government’s response to the mortgage crisis, the bailouts of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and other developments in housing-finance policy.

He graduated from Georgetown University, where he served as an editor of The Hoya, Georgetown’s premier campus newspaper.

Josh Zumbrun, who has been turning everything imaginable into charts since he joined us last week, also will report on topics across the field of economics.

Josh, who grew up on a hog farm in Indiana, has covered vast terrain in a decade of D.C. reporting. He started on the Metro and Style desks at the Washington Post, where he pioneered the practice of—and the term—hypermiling. (He can explain.) He went on to excel in covering the economy and the Federal Reserve, first at Forbes and then Bloomberg for the past four years. His background includes service as a Citgo gas station attendant and a cook at Hot Stuff Pizza.

Josh, who graduated from Georgetown with a degree in international economics, also served as the editor of The Hoya – a year before Nick.

Please join us in welcoming all to their new posts.