Just before the holidays, Ryan Faughnder wrangled his third job since graduating from USC Annenberg in the spring of 2012. Following paid internships at the LA Times and Bloomberg News, he joined the Los Angeles Business Journal December 17 as a staff reporter.

“I’ll be covering manufacturing, transportation and trade,” Faughnder tells FishbowlLA. “Meaning I’ll be dealing with the ports on a very regular basis. I’m helping out by contributing other types of stories too, like this one on a struggling local flash-sales website.”

Faughnder (pictured) heard about the Business Journal job from a friend and former classmate who works there. He thinks the fact that he’d been focused at LAT and Bloomberg on business journalism was definitely a major plus, as was his genuine interest in the beat.

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They’re high-fiving today in the halls of USC’s Annenberg journalism school. Alongside five nominations for California Watch, four for the LA Times and one for Bill Simmons’ Grantland, digital campus hub neontommy.com has landed a 2012 Online News Association (ONA) Online Journalism Awards nomination for their April 21 report about the fatal shooting of two Chinese graduate students.

The byline for the article lists (former) executive editor Ryan Faughnder, (former) deputy editor Tracy Bloom and NeonTommy staff. The group-effort breaking news track was of the now-familiar Internet kind that featured multiple, subsequent top-of-page updates:

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