The Orange County Business Journal, one of the most successful local business publications in the country, has made a promotion and hired three journalists.
Executive Editor Peter J. Brennan has been promoted to editor-in-chief.
“We cover an economy the size of Finland’s, and we’re always looking for the next Palmer Luckey,” Brennan said. “We will continue highlighting the most influential entrepreneurs and executives and their companies in accurate and interesting articles.”
The Business Journal has recently hired Nancy Luna as executive editor, Parimal M. Rohit as real estate reporter and Sara Shirazian as copy editor.
Luna is a veteran business journalist known for her in-depth coverage of the restaurant industry. She began her career 30 years ago at the Orange County Register, where she covered a range of beats, including retail, consumer trends, transportation, healthcare and tourism.
At the Register, Luna gained national recognition for her blog, Fast Food Maven, which she authored from 2007 to 2012. Her work at the Register covered significant industry events, including the Southern California grocery strikes and the effects of the Great Recession on local chains such as Taco Bell, In-N-Out Burger, Del Taco and BJ’s Restaurants Inc.
Luna previously worked as a correspondent for Business Insider’s retail team, where she specialized in writing about food tech companies impacting restaurants and grocery chains such as DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub and Instacart. In 2023, Luna contributed to the Insider team that won a SABEW Award for explanatory journalism for their “Warehouse Nation” project.
From 2018 to 2020, Luna was a senior editor and tech editor at Nation’s Restaurant News, where she conducted behind-the-scenes interviews with top executives from industry giants like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Chipotle Mexican Grill. Luna is an Orange County native who lives in Old Towne Orange with her husband, Brady.
Veteran of Bollywood, CoStar News
Rohit has nearly two decades of experience in journalism and recently covered Texas real estate for CoStar News and the Austin Business Journal. He was also the editor of The Log, covering Southern California’s and Northern Mexico’s maritime and environmental spaces. Throughout his career, Rohit has also covered the Los Angeles Lakers, Los Angeles Dodgers, Bollywood and California politics.
Rohit won 12 reporting awards from the San Diego Press Club, including best environmental reporting and best essay/commentary, and the Fort Worth chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. His hobbies include photography, podcasting, travel and filmmaking. He is also the recipient of several fellowships, including one through the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism and another through the RK Mellon Foundation.
Editor and Poet
Shirazian is a 2023 University of California, Los Angeles graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in English and minor in Professional Writing. She’s worked at two newsmagazines before the Business Journal: Daily Bruin as Copy Editor and Al-Talib Newsmagazine as Content Writer and Editor, and the founding Newsletter Managing Editor.
Along with her editorial work, Shirazian writes and publishes poetry, and works one-on-one with authors on their novels, such as the recently published “The Brother of the Messenger” by Sayed Moustafa Al-Qazwini, PhD. Al-Talib Newsmagazine has published many of her poems, including “Every College Student’s Dream” and “Dooneh Dooneh.”
Her hobbies include surfing, kickboxing, hiking, traveling and writing and reading poetry.
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Brennan has been a journalist for more than 40 years, including a decade in Latin America and 15 years at Bloomberg News. He’s written thousands of articles that have been printed in publications worldwide including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Der Spiegel. He previously worked at the Business Journal from 1997 to 2000 before moving to Bloomberg where his headlines and articles often moved the market caps of companies by hundreds of millions of dollars.
