the audit

Susanne Craig leaving WSJ for the NYT

A blow to the Journal
August 30, 2010

Susanne Craig, one of The Wall Street Journal’s star Wall Street reporters, is moving to The New York Times, a boost for the Times and the latest blow to the Journal’s coverage of that core beat.

Craig told The Audit she’s “looking forward to a new challenge.”

Craig’s departure follows that of Peter Lattman, another Journal staffer who also went to the Times, and earlier, that of her former partner in Wall Street coverage, Kate Kelly, who left for CNBC.

Craig will be covering Wall Street and reporting to the Times’s main Business Day section as well as DealBook, the Times’s financial news service edited by Andrew Ross Sorkin. Lattman is also working for DealBook.

The Times has bulked up its business and economics coverage lately with the additions of Lattman and Peter Goodman, formerly of The Washington Post, and moving Michael Powell and David Kocieniewski.

Craig, forty two years old, has covered Wall Street for ten years and is a recognized authority on the beat. She led the paper’s coverage of the fall of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and was among the Journal reporters who were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for National Affairs Reporting for their coverage of the collapse of America’s financial system.

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Her piece late last year probed so-called “trading huddles” at big brokerages, sparking regulatory investigations into how stock ratings and research are disseminated on Wall Street.

In June 2004, Ms. Craig, along with colleagues Ianthe Jeanne Dugan, Theo Francis, and Kate Kelly, received the Loeb Award for Deadline Writing for “The Day Grasso Quit as NYSE Chief.”

Spokespeople from the Times and the Journal couldn’t be immediately be reached.

(UPDATE: 4:30 p.m. In a memo to staff, the Times‘s business editor Larry Ingrassia says: “It probably goes without saying, but among our many competitors, she has always stood out as an accomplished journalist and for her exclusive, behind-the-scenes coverage of Wall Street.”

A Journal spokeswoman says: “We thank Sue for her years of great reporting, and we wish her the best.”)

(UPDATE No. 2: Ryan Chittum looks at how the NYT is going at the heart of a Journal that has de-emphasized business coverage to do battle with it.

Dean Starkman Dean Starkman runs The Audit, CJR’s business section, and is the author of The Watchdog That Didn’t Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism (Columbia University Press, January 2014). Follow Dean on Twitter: @deanstarkman.