LA Times loses DC enviro and energy reporter to website

Neela Bannerjee, the energy and environmental policy reporter in the Los Angeles Times Washington bureau, is leaving after four years. She is going to InsideClimate News, the small nonprofit website in Brooklyn that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting for stories on an oil spill into the Kalamazoo River. She previously reported for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where she was a Moscow correspondent. She is now choosing a nonprofit website over a major newspaper Washington bureau to continue her reporting career. "My four years at the LAT DC bureau showed me that environmental reporting is what I really want to do," she writes in a warm note to the staff this afternoon. "Going to ICN will let me cover environmental issues in a different way, through investigative reporting, analysis and feature stories."

Her note also observes that the Washington bureau of the LA Times is moving to a new location on Dec. 15.

Bannerjee tweets as @neelaeast. That's her Twitter profile pic at the top.