Biz news website The Wire covering China launches

A business news website called The Wire covering China’s economic rise launched this week.

Former New York Times staff writer David Barboza is one of the founders and a staff writer. Its first story was written by former Times White House correspondent Gardiner Harris and Alex W. Palmer, who writes for the New York Times magazine.

The Wire has added former Times editors Jill Abramson and Lawrence Ingrassia to its board. It has hired Chloe Fox as managing editor and Gary Putka as executive editor.

“We’d like to create a magazine that focuses on in-depth journalism, backed up with documents, great interviews and good storytelling,” said Barboza in an email. “And our topic is one of the most important stories of our time, the rise of China, as a business and economic force. I’ve been waiting a long time for this moment.”

The publication’s genesis is from Barboza’s Nieman Fellowship.

In 2013, Barboza was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting “for his striking exposure of corruption at high levels of the Chinese government, including billions in secret wealth owned by relatives of the prime minister, well-documented work published in the face of heavy pressure from the Chinese officials.” He was also part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

From 2008 to 2015, he served as the paper’s Shanghai bureau chief.

Barboza won two awards in the Society of American Business Editors and Writers’ 2007 Best in Business Journalism Contest, one for a Times article, “A Chinese Reformer Betrays His Cause, and Pays.”

He was also part of the team that won the 2008 Grantham Prize for environmental reporting for the series “Choking on Growth: China’s Environmental Crisis.” In 2002, he was part of a team that was named a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Enron scandal.