Slate Taps Bethany McLean And Annie Lowrey For Business And Economics Coverage

There's been a gap in Slate's business and economics coverage
since the departure last month of Dan Gross as Moneybox
columnist. But the online news and culture magazine has lured
some new talent to fill it.

Slate has tapped veteran business journalist Bethany McLean, a
Vanity Fair contributing editor and the co-author with Joe Nocera
of a forthcoming book on the financial crisis, to write a
yet-to-be-named column about Wall Street and finance, Business
Insider has learned. Meanwhile, Annie Lowrey, most recently a
reporter for The Washington Independent, will take over Moneybox,
focusing on economics and economic policy, as a full-time staff
writer.

Slate editor-in-chief David Plotz confirmed the hires in a brief
phone interview.

"Dan was somebody who did everything, so now we're dividing up
the coverage," said Plotz.

In July, Slate shuttered its two-year-old standalone business
news website, The Big Money. But Slate chairman Jacob Weisberg
stressed at the time that, "The decision to
close TBM as a separate destination doesn't signal a move away
from business as a category or a subject. To the contrary, we
expect Slate's engagement with business to get much stronger as a
result of folding in aspects of what the separate site has been
doing."

Plotz echoed those sentiments.

"We're not Fortune or
BusinessWeek or even a necessary stop for business and economics
coverage, but we're a place that traditionally thinks and writes
really, really well about these issues," he said, citing past
columnists like Austan Goolsbee, Slate founding editor Michael
Kinsley and Business Insider's Henry Blodget.

It appears that McLean will
continue to write for Vanity Fair, though she could not be
reached to comment for this item. Her book with Nocera, "All the Devils Are Here," hits stands Nov. 16
from Portfolio Hardcover. She will begin writing for Slate
sometime in the next few weeks.

Lowrey, who was at The
Washington Independent for seven months, begins her new job
today.

"I joined The Washington Independent, never having worked for a
web-only publication and never having done policy reporting at
Internet speed," she wrote in a farewell post on Monday. "It is with
a heavy heart that I’m leaving TWI for Slate."