Meet the Tampa Bay Times' new business columnist

The Tampa Bay Times has a new business columnist: Veteran reporter and editor Graham Brink will take on that role in May.

That will lead to changes in newsroom leadership as Deputy Managing Editor Amy Hollyfield takes on oversight for metro, politics and business.

Brink, now the assistant managing editor for metro and business, replaces Robert Trigaux, who retired last year after spending 16 years as the Times business columnist.

Hollyfield, who oversees political coverage for the Times, will add the metro and business reporting staffs to her portfolio in May when Brink takes on his new role.

"This is a terrific opportunity for two of our top journalists to influence our work in important new ways," Times Managing Editor Jennifer Orsi said.

The Tampa Bay business community is a beat that Brink, 47, knows quite well. He spent six years as the Times' business editor from 2008-14 and helped that staff win one of its highest honors.

"I can't think of a better choice for business columnist than Graham — a talented journalist in every way, a deep thinker, and steeped in knowledge about the Tampa Bay business community," Orsi said.

He started his career at the newspaper an hour north of its St. Petersburg headquarters, working as a reporting intern in the Port Richey bureau.

Brink went on to work in the Hernando and Hillsborough bureaus, covering the police beat and federal courts before working as a general assignment reporter in St. Petersburg. He became an assistant metro editor in 2007. The next year, he was named business editor.

In 2014 he guided the newspaper to win a Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business and Financial Journalism, the highest honor in business journalism. Brink edited a series of stories about now-defunct plans to build a nuclear plant in Levy County and the busted nuclear plant in Crystal River, that won the beat reporting category.

That same year Brink was promoted to metro editor and in 2016 became assistant managing editor for metro and business.

Hollyfield, 47, has spent more than 20 years rising through the Times newsroom in myriad roles.

She started her career at the newspaper as an intern in the sports department, joining the staff full time in 1992 as a copy editor. After some time at the Miami Herald, she returned to the Times in 1998 as a page designer, then became Sunday editor and news design director.

She has also worked as a reporter in Tallahassee covering state politics, as a reporter and editor for PolitiFact, and as the newspaper's government and politics editor.

In 2009 she was a member of the PolitiFact staff that won the Pulitzer Prize for National reporting and in 2012, as the assistant managing editor for politics and business, she managed coverage of the Republican National Convention in Tampa.

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She became a deputy managing editor in 2014.

"Amy is an editor with a record of excellence at everything she's done," Orsi said, "and we are lucky to have her overseeing such a large and vital part of our news operation."