WSJ names new Hollywood reporting team

Wall Street Journal business editor Dennis Berman sent out the following announcement on Monday:

With this month’s addition of Hollywood reporter Erich Schwartzel, Los Angeles has an entirely new team covering the movie and music industries.

The team has already shown its chops breaking news in real-time, doing strong enterprise stories, and under the guidance of bureau chief Ethan Smith, infusing coverage with our animating principle: Showing how the world of business really works.

A newcomer not just to the Journal but to L.A. and Hollywood, Erich spent nearly four years at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, most recently covering energy and natural gas drilling for the paper’s business section. His reporting helped explain how fracking was changing local economics across Pennsylvania, while also sparking a shareholder revolt against Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon. At the Post-Gazette, Erich was the founder and editor of Pipeline, a website dedicated to natural gas drilling news and information that won the Online News Association award for best specialty site.

Erich won the Scripps Howard Award for Environmental Reporting, as well as honors from the Society of Business Editors and Writers and the Sidney Hillman Foundation. Erich grew up in Latrobe, Pa., and graduated from Boston University. He got his start in business reporting at the Boston Globe, where he worked as a correspondent and editorial assistant in college. He will be covering the movie business including studios, talent agencies, guilds, new online-entertainment companies – and the outsize personalities who run them all.

If Erich is the rookie, Ben Fritz is the savvy veteran, having joined the Journal in February to cover the Hollywood studios and Walt Disney Co. He’s written about the challenges of making a buck in special effects, the rise of comedian Kevin Hart and delivered memorable profiles on several Hollywood executives. He joined us from the LA Times, where he covered the film and videogame businesses for nearly four years. Prior to that, he worked at the Hollywood trade paper Variety with beats including movies, tech and finance. Ben is also a co-author of the best-selling book “All the President’s Spin,” and was a correspondent for NPR program “The Business.” He has written for Salon, Slate and Portfolio. He lives with his wife, one year-old son and two cats, plays volleyball, and is often up way too late at night on his Xbox.

Rounding out the bureau’s entertainment group is Hannah Karp, who has been creatively covering the music business for us since April, chronicling country-fried rappers who love mud and trucks, the tattooed executive who’s on a mission to standardize spelling and grammar for song titles online, and pretty much everything in between. Hannah has been with the Journal since 2004, covering a wide range of subjects including travel, sports, consumer product companies and most recently general news out of Southern California. A native of Berkeley, Calif., Hannah graduated with a BA in economics from Duke University and an MS in journalism from Northwestern. She joined the Journal’s London bureau as an intern in 2004 after a brief stint with Dow Jones Newswires in São Paulo. She lives in L.A. with her husband and 18-month-old daughter.