WSJ hires AP reporter Horwitz to cover Facebook

The Wall Street Journal has hired Associated Press reporter Jeff Horwitz to cover Facebook.

He will be based in San Francisco and will start at the end of next month.

Horwitz was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University in 2013-14 and a graduate of the M.A. program at Columbia Journalism School. He has been at the AP for the past five years.

Horwitz, who is based in Washington, D.C., previously was a staff reporter for The Washington City Paper, The San Bernardino Sun, Legal Times and American Banker.

As a reporter for American Banker between 2009 and 2013, he wrote about banks’ legal woes and the fallout from the housing crisis. He documented how shoddy record-keeping and robo-signing pervaded JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s sale of defaulted credit card debts, and exposed how banks profited from the sale of overpriced insurance.

He was a 2012 Loeb Award finalist for stories exposing how banks used insurance to disguise billions of dollars of housing boom-era kickbacks.

Last year, Horwitz received the annual Christopher J. Welles Memorial Prize from Columbia for his path-breaking and persistent reporting on the Paul Manafort saga.