Graham Brink named Tampa Bay Times business columnist; Amy Hollyfield expands duties

Two veteran journalists at the Tampa Bay Times will assume prominent new roles in business and local coverage, Managing Editor Jennifer Orsi has announced. Graham Brink has been named business columnist, and Amy Hollyfield will expand her editing portfolio to include metro, politics and business.

A graduate of Queen's University and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, Brink, 47, started at the Times in 1997 as an intern. He has worked as a reporter in Hernando, Hillsborough, Pasco and Pinellas counties. Brink joined the editing ranks in 2007 as an assistant metro editor. He became business editor a year later and went on to edit a series of stories on nuclear power plants that won the Gerald Loeb Award, one of the highest honors in business reporting. Brink was promoted to metro editor in 2014 and named assistant managing editor of metro and business in 2016. In his new role, Brink will replace Robert Trigaux, who retired last year.

Hollyfield, a deputy managing editor, is a graduate of Northwestern University. She joined the Times as an intern in the sports department and came aboard full time in 1992 as a copy editor. After a stint at the Miami Herald, Hollyfield, 47, returned to the Times in 1998 as a page designer, then became Sunday editor and news design director. She has worked as a reporter in the Tallahassee bureau covering state politics, as a reporter and editor for PolitiFact, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009, and as the newspaper's government and politics editor. Hollyfield was named deputy managing editor in 2014, responsible for politics, features and sports.

"This is a terrific opportunity for two of our top journalists to influence our work in important new ways,'' Orsi said. Brink and Hollyfield will assume their new roles in early May.