Washington Post hires Ovide as help desk strategy editor

Washington Post business editor Lori Montgomery, technology editor Christina Passariello and personal technology editor Yun-Hee Kim sent out the following on Monday:

Shira, who joins us from the New York Times, will help launch, write and edit a newsletter in collaboration with The Post’s five-member Help Desk team. Shira brings a strong voice to the Help Desk’s mission to hold technology accountable and shape it to serve our needs as consumers, citizens, workers and parents. A dynamo of energy, curiosity and imagination, Shira also will work across departments to help imagine new formats to showcase Help Desk content and personalities in audio, video, live journalism and more.

At the Times, Shira helped launch and wrote On Tech With Shira Ovide, a newsletter about the ways technology is changing our world. For 2 1/2 years, Shira’s newsletter has been a unique, accessible, useful and friendly guide to understanding technology and its influences. She has written about the opportunities to bring more people online and make the most of digital life — and why the best technology is often the boring stuff. She also has shone a light on how powerful tech companies affect freedom of expression, how they have become as influential as governments, and how they alter the livelihoods of people who earn a living online.

Before the Times, Shira was a technology columnist for Bloomberg Opinion, where she was a 2019 finalist for the Gerald Loeb Award in commentary. For nearly a decade before that, Shira was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires covering technology and media and writing a blog about finance and deals. In that role, she once highlighted the eerie similarities between an investor pitch for Facebook stock and a familiar email scam.

Raised in Dayton, Ohio, Shira graduated from Haverford College with a political science degree and earned a graduate degree from Columbia Journalism School. She describes herself as an enthusiastic but terrible cyclist and a beginning bird watcher. (She recently spent hours searching — unsuccessfully — to spot a black-billed cuckoo.) As a child, she was an avid reader of Zillions, a consumer interest magazine for kids from the publisher of Consumer Reports — a fitting start for a future Help Desk journalist.