Jeff Abell
Jeff Abell connects Baltimore’s fiscal decisions to their impact on residents and businesses, combining watchdog reporting on city spending with ground-level voices. He is a general assignment reporter and Saturday evening anchor for FOX45’s News at Ten, working across the station’s metro coverage with a focus on financial accountability stories. His finance beat runs through coverage of property taxes, public procurement, and the costs and consequences of major city projects.
City spending, taxes, and accountability
Abell’s reporting repeatedly scrutinises how public money is spent and whether taxpayers receive value in return.
He covers Baltimore’s procurement office after an inspector general report finds more than $1 million wasted, breaking down how internal failures translate into lost public funds. In his work on the city’s homestead tax credit, he follows council decisions to raise the credit cap and the criticism that such moves function as a tax hike for homeowners, keeping attention on the fine print of local tax policy.
He also examines a $2.2 million website project that delivers no functioning site while costs keep climbing, using the “no site, soaring costs” debacle to show how poorly managed initiatives can drain budgets with little benefit. Across these stories, he treats city hall as a subject for financial analysis, translating budget lines, audits and policy changes into clear narratives about who pays and who benefits.
Business pressure and policy impacts
Abell brings business owners and workers into his finance coverage, showing how government decisions land on the street. During the pandemic he reports from restaurant districts such as Little Italy, documenting how extensions of stay-at-home orders frustrate owners whose revenue has evaporated but whose fixed costs continue. His coverage of tax policy and city spending often returns to small businesses’ ability to absorb new costs, whether through higher property tax burdens or delayed relief, giving economic measures a human scale that reflects payrolls, rent and risk.
The emphasis is less on abstract indicators and more on margins, closures and the choices local entrepreneurs face when policy changes outpace cash flow.
Neighborhood voices and district-level coverage
Abell uses field formats to gather unfiltered reactions from residents to the financial and political decisions shaping their districts. With the FOX45 soapbox in the 8th District, he invites people to speak directly about their experiences, including how places like the Edmondson Village Shopping Center figure into daily life and local debates.
That approach surfaces concerns that might not appear in formal hearings or press conferences, and it frames budget and policy questions against the realities of shopping, commuting and safety. His coverage of the Metro Subway shutdown similarly highlights questions about timing and oversight, reporting that there are serious questions about whether the system should have been closed earlier and what that meant for riders. These stories tie infrastructure and public services back to household routines, turning transit and retail issues into financial stories about time, access and trust.
Long-form storytelling on Baltimore crises
Alongside daily accountability pieces, Abell takes on longer-form work that situates financial and civic crises in the city’s recent history.
In a cover story on historians documenting the Baltimore riots, he follows efforts to catalogue a trove of photographs that could become part of the historical record, connecting past unrest to ongoing debates about investment, inequality and recovery. That narrative instinct also informs his coverage of oversight failures and expensive missteps, where he traces how official decisions, ignored warnings and rising budgets accumulate over time into crises of confidence.
The through-line is an interest in how numbers on a page correspond to lived events - shutdowns, protests, abandoned projects - and how those events then shape the next round of financial and political choices.
Across his work at FOX45, Abell occupies a hybrid space between finance reporter and city desk correspondent, treating audits, contracts, tax changes and emergency orders as stories about accountability to residents and businesses. He moves readily from council chambers and inspector general reports to small business districts and transit platforms, keeping focus on the consequences of official decisions rather than the personalities behind them. For anyone looking to land a story within his beat, fit hinges on whether the subject sheds light on how public money is managed, how financial policy affects everyday life, or how local institutions succeed or fail in delivering the services they fund.
4 more finance journalists.
Abigail Summerville
Abigail Summerville brings a leveraged finance background to her work covering consumer and retail mergers and acquisitions for Reuters. She reports on deal-making and capital markets across food, beverages, spirits, personal care, skincare, bath products and pet food. Her stories focus on transaction terms, ownership stakes, valuation, debt structures and funding sources. She often breaks news on potential sales and strategic reviews before formal announcements. Notable coverage includes Sazerac’s acquisition of Au Vodka, Blackstone’s exploration of a ZO Skin Health sale, CVC’s efforts to sell the parent of Dr Teal’s, and Colgate-Palmolive’s planned divestitures. She also covers consumer IPOs, including Jersey Mike’s and Black Rock Coffee, and co-writes Wall Street market reports. She joined Reuters in 2022 after three years covering leveraged finance and primary debt markets.
Adekunle Agbetiloye
Adekunle Agbetiloye is a senior reporter who connects capital flows, hard numbers and energy transition to the wider African economy. He works at Business Insider Africa, covering how money, technology and energy reshape economic growth, jobs and living conditions. His beat spans the African economy, technology, energy transition, climate change, startups and critical minerals, with a focus on concrete deals and data-led stories. He reports on African startup funding cycles, sovereign wealth funds, billionaire investors, multilateral and private investment programs, energy and power markets, Bitcoin mining, and economic policy choices. His work follows how governments finance spending, manage debt and respond to social pressure, and how sector snapshots and health and development metrics reveal links between macro indicators, corporate strategy and everyday costs.
Aimee Picchi
Aimee Picchi connects Social Security, retirement programs and economic policy directly to the financial security of ordinary Americans, showing how macro decisions hit household budgets. She is associate managing editor for CBS MoneyWatch at CBS News, covering business and personal finance with clear, accessible explanations of complex money issues. Her core beat is Social Security and retirement, interest rates and inflation, and how policy, markets and company strategies affect workers, retirees, savers and investors. She reports on benefit adequacy, looming Social Security cuts, COLA changes, Federal Reserve rate decisions, fuel costs, trade tensions and labor’s share of income, always framing coverage around pocketbook impacts. Her background includes retirement reporting fellowships, prior staff reporting on technology, media and business, an Institutional Investor book on affluent investors, and freelance work for national outlets. She also writes science fiction and fantasy and is a Nebula Award finalist.
Alex Harring
Alex Harring turns fast-moving market, economic and corporate developments into clear pre-market briefings that show what will matter when U.S. trading opens. He is a markets and economics reporter for CNBC’s digital platforms and writes Morning Squawk, a flagship daily newsletter that gives readers five key things to know before the stock market opens. His beat spans financial markets, investing, consumer trends and the U.S. economy, with coverage of central bank decisions, inflation, corporate strategy, sector moves and geopolitical shocks. He focuses on how policy, data and earnings shape equities, interest rates, currencies and investor positioning, linking price action with underlying drivers in real time and in reported features. Harring’s background reporting on corporate news, business and the economy across print, digital, broadcast and streaming informs his habit of connecting markets, companies and geopolitics in one frame.