Natasha Etzel
Natasha Etzel is a freelance writer who covers the business side of everyday spending, connecting company news in food and retail with clear guidance on how consumers manage their money and travel. She contributes news and service coverage to Fast Company and other outlets, with a focus on finance, travel, and business topics. Across her work, she turns complex subjects like price changes, credit card rewards, and travel hacks into practical stories that readers can use to make decisions.
Food, retail, and consumer impact stories
At Fast Company, Etzel’s food beat is anchored in the business decisions that shape where and how people eat and shop. One recent piece examines the closure of multiple On The Border locations, detailing the list of doomed company-owned restaurants and treating the story as a mix of restaurant-industry restructuring and consumer impact.
She also covers retail news such as the Walmart stock slip after criticism over tariff-driven price hikes, highlighting how political and trade decisions flow through to store pricing and shareholder reactions. Her news pieces stay close to the consequences for ordinary shoppers and diners, showing how corporate strategies and policy debates translate into higher costs, fewer local options, or shifting value propositions.
Rather than writing lifestyle food coverage, she situates chains and retailers in a broader context of business performance and customer experience.
Personal finance and credit card rewards
Etzel is an established personal finance writer, with more than a decade of experience covering topics such as credit cards, home finance, and broader money management.
Professional bios describe her as a financial writer specializing in credit cards and credit card rewards, and as a personal finance, business, and travel writer whose work appears in outlets including NerdWallet, The Motley Fool, Newsweek, USA Today, and Fast Company. Her articles for financial brands and publications often explain how to maximize value from tools like cash-back categories, making it easier for readers to align card choice and spending patterns with their goals. Through her Finance for Freelancers newsletter, she addresses the specific needs of freelance creatives, helping them manage finances and think strategically about their businesses.
Across these projects, her finance coverage is practical and instructional, focused on turning detailed product features and dense money topics into straightforward, usable advice.
Travel rewards and affordable travel strategies
Travel and points-and-miles coverage is another central strand of Etzel’s work, and it frequently overlaps with her finance reporting. Contributor bios emphasize that she writes about how to travel more affordably, including using credit card rewards to fund trips, and that she has spent years covering points and miles, travel hacks, and flight deals.
Her pieces for travel-focused outlets highlight money-saving strategies for travelers, such as leveraging booking promotions, credit card rewards, and targeted deals to reduce costs on hotels, flights, and gear. At Locals Insider, she covers consumer products for travelers, pairing brand and product information with concrete advice on stretching a travel budget.
This travel rewards beat is consistently framed as service journalism - she treats loyalty programs, promotions, and travel tools not as luxury perks but as levers that ordinary travelers can use to make more trips possible.
Business, technology, and workplace news
Beyond food, finance, and travel, Etzel contributes broader business and workplace coverage to Fast Company and other publications. Her professional profile notes that she covers business, technology, and workplace culture news, and her bylines include corporate and impact stories ranging from retail price dynamics to health-related developments such as advances in cancer vaccines. In these pieces, she writes in a concise news style that emphasizes what a development means for workers, customers, and companies rather than focusing on insider industry detail.
Across business outlets, she has built a portfolio that links corporate decisions and economic trends with the lived experience of readers, reinforcing the same through-line that runs through her food and finance coverage. Her work is consistently situated at the intersection of business news and practical implications, making complex or abstract developments legible to a general audience.
4 more food journalists.
Aaron Guerrero
Aaron Guerrero is head of the digital department at Miami’s Community Newspapers, where he pairs restaurant coverage with community-facing content. He focuses on how Miami-area restaurants evolve, celebrate, and experiment through new concepts, menus, and neighborhood-focused dining experiences. He reports on restaurant openings, such as an Italian food hall at Plaza Coral Gables, new executive lunch menus, and wood-fired Latin steakhouse brunches, explaining what sets each venue apart. He also covers awards, like a Wine Spectator honor for an Italian chophouse, and events that turn dining rooms into social hubs. His bylines extend to features on sports-themed gatherings, civic renamings, local visits to restaurant programs, sponsored community pieces, and official notices. His work is straightforward and descriptive, helping readers and local businesses connect around specific openings, promotions, and dining experiences.
Aarron Fleming
Aarron Fleming reports on how courts, jails and public safety systems work over time. He is a reporter at The Daily Memphian covering public safety, the local court system, suburban news and business developments in North Mississippi. His work follows trials, sentencing, appeals, plea deals and judicial decisions, including major cases tied to Tyre Nichols and rapper Young Dolph. He also covers jail conditions, inmate deaths, crime data, prosecution units, trafficking, shootings and public-order incidents. His suburban reporting examines cannabis businesses, restaurant openings and how commercial growth affects communities such as Olive Branch. Fleming previously covered education in the same newsroom. He uses clear, unadorned prose to explain legal steps, deadlines, institutional problems and the political, commercial and community effects of public-safety decisions.
Alana Al-Hatlani
Alana Al-Hatlani is a food writer and editor who treats recipes, restaurants, and food features as ways to explore culture, community, and the business of eating. She works on the food team at Southern Living, overseeing and contributing to print recipes and reported features. Her pastry-focused, restaurant-tested perspective comes from time in restaurant and bakery kitchens. She helps plan and write monthly food packages, including “The South’s Most Treasured Desserts,” and wrote “8 Summer Recipes Our Editors Make Every Year.” She also writes recipe tips, ingredient explainers, restaurant guides, and reported stories about workers, owners, and communities. Her subjects include regional specialties, dining scenes, kitchen basics, and food industries. Her work has appeared with OpenTable and Yahoo. She reports on the ground, explains techniques clearly, and connects specific dishes and places to larger stories about food and livelihood.
Alana Edgin
Alana Edgin is a business reporter whose strongest focus is food, restaurants and consumer-facing businesses. She works at the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal and has also had work syndicated across AOL and Yahoo News. She covers new openings, closings, expansions and franchise growth, along with retail, health, services, corporate news, data incidents, business support programs and sponsorships. Her reporting includes detailed roundups of new restaurants and businesses, coverage of El Pollo Loco’s opening, and stories on burger trucks, dessert shops, Vietnamese sandwich restaurants and gourmet markets. She also contributes to food and drink reviews, including fall coffee and jerky comparisons. Edgin reports with practical “what, when, where” details, structured comparisons and clear explanations of how offers, partnerships and business changes affect consumers and the local economy.