WSJ’s Aeppel joining Reuters

Eric Effron, editor in charge of company news for the Americas at Reuters, sent out the following announcement on Friday:

I’m delighted to announce that Timothy Aeppel is joining the Companies team to fill a new reporting role, covering the intersection of economics and companies, with an emphasis on manufacturing. Tim joins us after an acclaimed career at The Wall Street Journal, most recently as Chief Economics Correspondent, and is ideally suited to help us tell such vital stories as how technology is reshaping the economy and the nature of work, the impact of market turmoil on the demand for U.S. goods, and how an increase in minimum wage affects profitability and productivity. Tim previously spent six years as the Journal’s roving manufacturing correspondent and earlier served as a foreign correspondent, based in Germany. He began his career at the Christian Science Monitor, where he launched the paper’s first environmental affairs beat. He starts at Reuters on Tuesday and will be based in New York, reporting to Transportation and Manufacturing EIC Joe White.

A native of what he describes as “bustling Loup City, Nebraska,” Tim has spent much of his career chasing stories on the world’s factory floors and industrial byways, applying a sharp eye for detail coupled with a deep understanding of the macro forces that shape the economy. In one recent piece, for example, he showed that while by conventional measures, U.S. productivity is down, those measures do not account for many of the key drivers of the digital economy, such as apps (many of them free) that improve efficiency. And he’s very hands on.  He once built a tire in an Oklahoma factory only to watch workers there slice it to pieces to assure that the almost-certainly defective product didn’t reach customers.

A graduate of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and of Principia College, Tim is married with two children. He’s an avid runner and hiker, having scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro in 2011 – which bodes well for his ability to navigate his way around Reuters.