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Washington Post makes changes to tech team

March 28, 2023

Posted by Chris Roush

Washington Post business editor Lori Montgomery made the following announcement on Tuesday:

We are pleased to announce a new editing structure on the Business desk aimed at elevating the work of our growing technology team, a critical pillar of Washington Post journalism. This new structure will create clearer lanes of authority on the tech team, while focusing fresh attention on our superb personal finance coverage.

Christina Passariello
Christina Passariello will become deputy business editor for technology and personal finance, working alongside Deputy Business Editor Damian Paletta, who will retain responsibility for economics, health coverage and breaking news. In her new role, Christina will continue to oversee the technology team, helping to set strategy, guide coverage and advance our most ambitious projects. She also will take on the personal finance portfolio, drawing on her experience launching Help Desk, our signature personal tech vertical, to expand and elevate the team we’re building around our award-winning personal finance columnist, Michelle Singletary. In addition, Christina will lead an internal company task force focused on how the AI revolution will affect The Post’s journalism and its digital strategy, particularly search. In this initiative, which is separate from our news coverage of AI, she will work closely with Sally.
Christina has led The Post’s technology team for five years, overseeing a period of rapid growth and accomplishment. Among other achievements, she edited “Secret Life of Your Data,” a series by columnist Geoff Fowler that won a 2020 Loeb Award for commentary. She also edited a groundbreaking 2022 story by reporter Nitasha Tiku about a Google engineer who thought the company’s chatbot had come to life. And she conceived our unique approach to personal tech coverage, casting Help Desk as an initiative that would empower tech users instead of promoting the latest gadget. Before The Post, Christina spent 14 years at the Wall Street Journal, where she was deputy tech editor and a foreign correspondent in Paris, among other roles. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford, she is based in San Francisco.
Several of the tech editors, who will continue to report to Christina, also will assume new roles.
In San Francisco:
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 08: Laura Stevens is deputy technology editor for The Washington Post. She is photographed in Washington, DC on May 08, 2019. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Laura Stevens will become technology industry editor, driving news coverage across the tech team, which encompasses nearly half the Business staff and has outposts in Washington, New York, Florida and Texas. In this role, Laura will shape our daily report, pushing to set the news agenda on our most important lines of coverage, from the rise of artificial intelligence to the increasingly grim economic times in Silicon Valley, while looking for opportunities to illuminate other important developments, such as the recent collapse of Silicon Valley Bank. Laura will continue to lead a team of reporters trained on delivering scoops and enterprise on the evolution of the tech giants – including Apple, Amazon and Google – as well as the drama at Tesla, Twitter and other firms owned by Elon Musk, with a sharp focus on stories that reveal how Big Tech influences society and our lives.
Since joining The Post in 2019 as deputy tech editor, Laura has established herself as a tenacious competitor and valued mentor to reporters across the Business staff eager to develop sources inside corporate America. Among other achievements, Laura helped guide our sweeping 2021 dive into the Frances Haugen Facebook Papers, which revealed how the social media company exposed vulnerable communities around the world to a cocktail of dangerous content. Laura also drove our industry-leading coverage of Elon Musk, his Twitter takeover and his troubled tenure at Tesla. Before coming to The Post, Laura spent nine years at the Wall Street Journal, covering Amazon in San Francisco, UPS and FedEx in Atlanta, and Deutsche Bank in Frankfurt, Germany. She also worked at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Laura is graduate of the University of Central Florida and a Fulbright scholar who speaks fluent German.
Yun-Hee Kim author image (The Washington Post)
Yun-Hee Kim, our personal technology editor and the founding editor of Help Desk, will continue to oversee our stellar personal tech coverage while working with me and Christina to develop initiatives. Yun-Hee has displayed exceptional skill at scaling and expanding the Help Desk mission and guiding a team of reporters and editors who tap into the needs of our audience in fresh, innovative and urgent ways. In the coming year, Yun-Hee will build on this success by leading an expansion of The Post’s ambitions to extend our brand digitally to promote the personalities of our tech reporters and editors in San Francisco, New York and Washington; and to experiment with special content, including video, social media, podcasts and live events, aimed at cementing The Post’s reputation as a destination for tech coverage.
Yun-Hee joined The Post in June 2021 and almost immediately launched Help Desk, building it into a must-read destination for readers looking to make informed choices about the technology in their lives. Under her leadership, the Help Desk team has delivered actionable advice on such topics as whether you really should quit Facebook or TikTok as well as deep-dive stories of national importance on the privacy implications of the repeal of Roe vs. Wade and the data-sharing practices of health apps. Working with colleagues across the newsroom, Yun-Hee has championed new story formats, leading her team to produce award-winning interactive quizzes; engaging and informative social videos; a new tech column series; “The Tech Friend,” a new twice-weekly newsletter; and our just-launched project on the future of work. She has worked at the Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones, where she spent more than two decades as a reporter and editor in New York, Hong Kong and Seoul covering technology and business and leading news teams. Yun-Hee is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School.
WASHINGTON DC-MAY 24 Washington Post Features Writer Lisa Bonos in Washington, DC on May 24, 2018. (Marvin Joseph/The Washington Post)
Lisa Bonos, our assistant tech editor, will continue to provide editing support on a range of stories, from breaking news to features. Since joining the team in the fall, Lisa has guided our coverage of crypto, including the implosion of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, the downfall of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and the legal risks facing such celebrity crypto promoters as Tom Brady. Lisa also frequently pitches in as a reporter, covering the attack on Paul Pelosi, a mass shooting in Half Moon Bay, Calif., and Stanford’s fascination with SBF.
Before joining the tech team, Lisa worked in the Style section, covering dating and relationships. In nearly 18 years at The Post, she also has worked as an assistant editor on Outlook and a multiplatform editor on the Opinion and Business desks. Lisa, a graduate of UCLA, will report to Laura.
In Dallas:
WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 20: Washington Post staff portrait of Mark Seibel. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Mark Seibel, our indispensable tech policy editor, will remain focused on the intersection between tech companies and government regulation, privacy and surveillance, digital threats and election security. In four years at The Post, Mark has established himself as a master of investigative enterprise, especially rapid-response stories that either illuminate events in the news or anticipate them. Under his leadership, his reporters produced one of the earliest pieces on the rise of TikTok, a thorough look at the surveillance networks that helped the FBI catch the Jan. 6 rioters and a revelatory story about the surprising failure of the Jan. 6 House committee to address social media’s role in whipping up the mob that assaulted the U.S. Capitol in 2021. After Russia invaded Ukraine, Mark’s reporters delivered scoops about the devastated Russian economy, Ukraine’s controversial use of social media to undermine Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war and the role of satellites in the conflict. Mark also was a primary editor on the Pegasus Project, a 2021 investigation into spyware used to hack journalists, human rights activists and two women close to murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, which won a George Polk Award.
Mark came to The Post from BuzzFeed News, where he was national security editor, managing reporters from San Francisco to Brussels. Before that, he spent nearly 35 years at the Miami Herald and its associated Washington bureau (managed first by Knight-Ridder and later McClatchy), where he led reporting efforts that won three Pulitzer Prizes, three Polk awards and three Overseas Press Club awards. He has also worked at the Los Angeles Times, the San Jose Mercury News, the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News. Mark graduated from Southern Methodist University and studied Russian as a Nieman fellow.
In Washington:
WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 9: Alexis Fitts, Washington Post staff editor in Washington, DC. (Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post)
Alexis Sobel Fitts will become tech enterprise editor, a new role that recognizes her immense talent for executing and elevating our most ambitious enterprise. In addition to working with other tech editors to shape and advance our best ideas, Alexis will lead our coverage of artificial intelligence, coordinating reporters across the staff to give readers a vivid and comprehensive view of a technology whose impact on society promises to rival that of the personal computer and the World Wide Web. Alexis will serve as a touchpoint and resource for reporters and editors in other departments looking to write about AI, even as she continues to edit the popular Tech 202 newsletter and drive our reporting on the uneasy relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington.
Since joining The Post in July 2021 as deputy tech policy editor, Alexis has spearheaded some of our most ambitious projects, including our coverage of the Facebook Papers (with Laura) and our exclusive 2022 report on “Mudge,” the Twitter whistleblower. In between, Alexis has demonstrated an impressive ability to nurture reporters and help them execute their best ideas, including Gerrit De Vynck’s timely profile of crypto antagonist Molly White, Lizza Dwoskin’s exploration of the political transformation of Peter Thiel, Cat Zakrzewski’s investigation into Facebook’s foray into Astro-turf lobbying and Taylor Lorenz’s exposé of a video app that misled dozens of Black influencers. Alexis previously was deputy editor of Jezebel, a senior editor at Wired and a senior writer at the Columbia Journalism Review. She holds a master’s degree in science and technology journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Yale University, and will continue to report to Mark.