NY Times hires two new tech reporters

New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam sent out the following announcement on Tuesday:

We’re delighted to announce that Nico Grant and Tripp Mickle are joining The New York Times as tech reporters in San Francisco.

Nico, who will cover Google and its parent company, Alphabet, joins us from Bloomberg News, where he has reported on Google since early 2021. Nico has broken news on discrimination and sexual harassment allegations in Google’s research division, written on the mental health toll of Google’s workplace, and covered the gamut of Alphabet’s businesses from self-driving cars to drone deliveries to YouTube. Before covering Google, he reported on enterprise technology companies such as Oracle, Dell, Salesforce and HP, becoming a speed reader of corporate financial reports and balance sheets.

Born in Trinidad and raised in New York, Nico majored in media studies at Hunter College. While getting a master’s in journalism at CUNY, he was taught by some of our very own — including Ben Casselman — who spotted Nico’s talent early.

“Nico was the kind of student who made life easy, because he understood why business reporting matters and he was clearly passionate about it,” said Mo Hadi, deputy business editor, who taught Nico a class on covering companies. “Plus, he’s a really good writer.”

Tripp, who will cover Apple, is joining after eight years of writing about Apple, Google, bourbon and beer for The Wall Street Journal. During that time, he wrote about Jony Ive’s unexpected departure from Apple; the rise of a company procurement star known as the Blevinator; Tim Cook’s efforts to court close ties with President Trump; and the bargain that overextended Airbnb hosts said they made “with the devil.”

In May, Tripp’s first book, “After Steve: How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul,” will be published. It’s the inside story of the unspoken power struggle between Tim Cook and head designer Jony Ive after the death of Steve Jobs.

Tripp also spent some quality time on the “sin beat,” chronicling bourbon shortages, beer acquisitions and — just recently — the inside story of heavy metal whiskies. Before The Journal, Tripp spent eight years covering the Olympics for SportsBusiness Journal. He also interned as a sportswriter at Newsday, where he was assigned to “Steinbrenner watch” alongside then-Times clerk Michael S. Schmidt. Their job was to shout questions at the late Yankees owner as he exited the stadium, on the off chance Steinbrenner might grumble about a player or manager.

Tripp is from Charlotte, N.C. He is a graduate of Wake Forest University and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Please welcome Tripp, who starts this month; and Nico, who starts next month.