Edmund L. Andrews is a former economics reporter for The New York Times and the author of Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown. An extended excerpt from the book has appeared in The New York Times Magazine titled My Personal Financial Crisis.[1] He then appeared on CNBC, NPR's All Things Considered, the NewsHour on PBS, The Colbert Report, and other venues to promote his book.
Andrews has been criticized by Megan McArdle, a blogger from The Atlantic, for not mentioning his wife's bankruptcies in the book,[2] and by Andrew Leonard from the Salon magazine for not disclosing his book advance.[3] He responded to the criticism on the PBS website.[4] Megan McArdle blogged a response commenting on those explanations.[5] Later, The New York Times own public editor Clark Hoyt acknowledged the criticism and wrote that although Andrews "is an excellent reporter who explains complex issues clearly", he is "too close to [the financial crisis] story" and should not cover it closely for the Times.[6] Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at UC Berkeley, analyzed Hoyt's comments and the bankruptcy filing concluding "he should have revealed the second bankruptcy, if only to head off the criticism, but because it shapes how we assess the damage done by the too-easy availability of credit".[7]
In December 2009, he took a buyout from The New York Times.[8] He has begun writing for the blog Capital Gains and Games[9] and is senior Washington writer for a non-profit digital economic news start-up, the Fiscal Times.[10]
In November 2010, Andrews was hired as a managing editor for National Journal. Four months later he was demoted to deputy editor for the publication's magazine department. On November [11] 30, 2011, Politico.com revealed that Mr. Andrews was fired from the National Journal and asked to leave the premises immediately for inappropriate behavior involving a younger female reporter.[12]