NY Times hires Grind as tech investigations reporter

New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock sent out the following on Tuesday:

We’re delighted to welcome Kirsten Grind to The New York Times. She starts later this month as a tech investigations reporter in San Francisco.

Kirsten joins from The Wall Street Journal, where she was an enterprise reporter. In her 12 years at The Journal, Kirsten routinely exposed suspect behavior, wrongdoing and raised questions about some of the most powerful players in tech and finance. She reported and wrote stories on Elon Musk’s drug use and his transformation of Twitter to X, delved into workplace issues at Activision Blizzard, chronicled the troubled life of Zappos chief executive Tony Hsieh, laid out the downfall of onetime bond king Bill Gross at Pimco and more.

Nurturing sources to impart information is not easy in the tight-knit tech and finance industries, but Kirsten is known for her persistence and unflappability. Jessica Silver-Greenberg, an investigative reporter in Business who worked with Kirsten at The Journal, said that Kirsten was always reporting.

“When she was basically 10 months pregnant, I called her, fully expecting that she’d be sitting on the couch eating ice cream,” Jessica recalled. “Instead, she was in the parking lot of Pimco, where she was chasing down employees to expose the downfall of the bond manager.”

Kirsten, a San Diego native, graduated from Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, Calif., where she was the managing editor of the school paper, Mustang Daily. Before The Journal, she worked at local papers including The Pueblo Chieftain and Fort Collins Coloradoan in Colorado, The Puget Sound Business Journal in Seattle and The Seattle Times.

She was a 2010 Pulitzer Prize finalist and has received more than a dozen national awards for her work, including a Gerald Loeb Award. She wrote the book “The Lost Bank,” about the collapse of Washington Mutual during the 2008 financial crisis, and was the co-author of “Happy at Any Cost: The Revolutionary Vision and Fatal Quest of Zappos C.E.O. Tony Hsieh.”

Please welcome her to The Times.