WSJ overhauls Money & Investing team

Wall Street Journal finance editor Dennis Berman sent out the following announcement:

The Bold–Faced Names of M&I

There are a lot of changes underway at the Money & Investing team and I wanted to share them with you. The moves are intended to make our coverage more analytical, impactful, and timely, while giving our staff opportunity to adapt and grow.

A new Financial Enterprise team

David Enrich will be returning to Money & Investing in New York during 2016. David will be starting a new financial enterprise team, comprised of veteran reporters who will be at the vanguard of in-depth reporting on markets, unregulated Wall Street, and global money flows.

David joined the Journal in 2007 and covered Citigroup during the financial crisis and then moved to London in 2010. As European Banking Editor, David presided over a team of reporters that dominated some of Europe’s most important, and competitive, stories. David’s most recent project — a five-part series based on his relationship with Libor mastermind Tom Hayes — is the basis of a book he’s currently writing for HarperCollins. In his new role, David will continue to work as both a reporter and an editor.

Joining his team will be Anupreeta Das, Kirsten Grind and Serena Ng.

Anupreeta joined the Journal in 2010 from Reuters to cover M&A. In that role, she broke news of some of the biggest takeovers of the post-financial crisis era. More recently, she has covered Warren Buffett and his company Berkshire Hathaway. She has also profiled the secretive billionaires behind 3G Capital, Bill Gates’ pink-shirt-sporting money manager and at least two alleged crooks. In her new role, Preeta will continue with Berkshire while also writing about Wall Street and the presidential race.

Kirsten will be covering the unregulated part of Wall Street – an area that is continuing to grow as the old Wall Street infrastructure shrinks. She has covered asset management for almost four years at the Journal. Her coverage of Bill Gross and the tumult at Pimco earned her a Loeb Award and a Newswomen’s Club of New York Front Page award this year. Prior to that, she covered the collapse of Washington Mutual for the Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle, earning a Pulitzer finalist citation. She wrote a book about WaMu called The Lost Bank.

Serena will write about the business of Wall Street, focusing on the activities of large banks in the financial markets and the unintended consequences of regulation. Serena joined the Journal in 2006 and previously spent 7 years in Money & Investing covering a range of subjects, from credit markets to exchanges and insurance. During the mortgage and financial crisis she pieced together complex trading strategies by hedge funds, banks, and insurers that ended up exacerbating the downturn. Serena has also covered companies including AIG, Berkshire Hathaway and Procter & Gamble. She has won two Loeb awards.

A new Financial Technology team

From bitcoin to peer lending, chip cards and robo-investment advice, the business of banking and financial intermediation is transforming more rapidly than most of us have seen in our lifetimes.

Aaron Lucchetti is becoming editor of financial-technology coverage, based in New York and reporting to banking editor Brad Reagan. Aaron is a 19-year veteran of the Journal whose reporting tenure spanned booms and busts in dot-coms and the U.S. housing market. In recent years, he’s reported and edited on the tectonic shifts affecting big banks and in 2008 was part of a reporting group that won the Gerald Loeb award for breaking news.

Telis Demos will be the Journal’s lead financial technology reporter, immersing himself in the vast changes happening on Wall Street and Sand Hill Road. Since joining the Journal in 2012 from the Financial Times, Telis has covered capital markets and IPOs, keeping us ahead of the competition on high-stakes deals and diving into the tricks entrepreneurs and venture capitalists’ play to burnish technology companies’ balance sheets in the eyes of investors.

Peter Rudegeair will also join the fintech team, focusing on how established banks and lenders are changing to deal with the new threats and fighting off new rivals who want to steal customers using algorithms and mobile-phone apps. Since joining the Journal from Reuters in 2014, Peter has spearheaded the Journal’s coverage of bank earnings and done insightful analyses of how banks are dealing with problems including low interest rates and scrutiny over pay.

In addition, Robin Sidel, who has distinguished herself on the credit card and payments beat, is adding financial cybersecurity to her mandate. Robin, who has covered M&A, banking, and Wall Street for 14 years, will be building on her extensive coverage of retail data breaches to develop similar contacts and stories for the broader financial-services industry.

A new Currencies and Commodities Editor

Craig Karmin is re-joining M&I, making the leap from the real-estate team. He will be leading our currencies and commodities teams, areas in which he has broad experience.

Craig has been a reporter for 16 years, having previously covered emerging markets, foreign exchange, and most recently the hospitality industry and real estate. Previously, he worked for The Hill newspaper and was a foreign correspondent in Prague following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc communist regimes. His book, Biography of the Dollar, was a best-seller and has been translated into Japanese, Portuguese and several other languages.

A new Stocks editor

Lydia Serota is our new stocks editor, having recently moved back from the London office, where she was deputy editor of the real-time desk and developed a love of tea and travel. She started at the WSJ in 2007 on the wsj.com evening shift after working as a news editor at Yahoo. She also enjoys solving Methode mysteries.

A revamped Deals team

Marie Beaudette is now the full deputy for the deals team, which is on a historically strong run of deals scoops and strong feature coverage. She was previously based in Washington, D.C., where she led the Dow Jones bankruptcy team for about five years, a period that included filings for Lehman, GM, Chrysler and American Airlines. Prior to joining Dow Jones, Marie was a reporter at Legal Times in Washington covering law firms and the legal departments of several federal agencies, including the newly formed Department of Homeland Security.

Matt Jarzemsky is becoming a double-threat reporter, adding the private equity business to his current restructuring beat. Matt has broken bankruptcy news on Caesars, RadioShack and other companies including private equity-backed energy producers Exco and Samson Resources since joining the Journal’s deals team in fall 2014. He began at Dow Jones by covering the stock market. Earlier he covered real estate at Institutional Investor News and small-cap stocks at Bloomberg.

Maureen Farrell will take over the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of initial public offerings, capital markets and the evolving market for pre-IPO financing. She joins the deals team from MoneyBeat where she has spent the past two years covering M&A, banks, hedge funds and more than a dozen hours of Bill Ackman conference calls and meetings.  She started at the Journal in late 2013 after stints at Forbes, CNNMoney, Mergermarket and Debtwire.

A new asset management reporter

Sarah Krouse is moving to cover asset management, writing about money managers such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity. She joined Dow Jones in London in 2011, covering asset management at Financial News and contributing to WSJ European property reports. She moved to New York as the U.S. correspondent for Financial News in 2014. Sarah previously covered real estate and economic development at The Washington Business Journal in D.C., where she wrote a series on controversial leasing decisions by the Securities and Exchange Commission and spent a great deal of time lost on the Beltway.

A new visuals reporter

Daniel Huang is moving to a role as visuals reporter, helping Sarah Slobin’s team report out and devise the best visuals possible for our daily and enterprise journalism. Daniel started at WSJ last year as a summer intern on the markets team, where he helped out on coverage of the energy and stock markets. He joined full-time in the fall as a general assignment banking reporter, and has written about cybersecurity at banks, retail investing and the fintech. He graduated from New York University with a degree in economics and media studies.