BuzzFeed’s Maheshwari to join NY Times biz desk

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following announcement on Friday:

We’re pleased to announce that Sapna Maheshwari will be joining our media team as a reporter covering advertising.

Sapna has been a reporter at BuzzFeed since 2013, where she has distinguished herself with aggressive and creative coverage of retail and e-commerce. Previously, she was a reporter for Bloomberg News covering corporate credit, stocks, insurance companies and retail.

Sapna’s investigation of JustFab, a discount clothing startup, won a Best in Business award from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. Her piece on Chinese companies using Facebook to sell knockoff clothing – often so poorly made as to be unwearable – is the most-read investigative feature ever on BuzzFeed with 3.6 million views, according to the site’s tracking.  (The story was rich with online visuals, including photos of dresses promised by the companies and those actually delivered.)  And she and a BuzzFeed colleague won a Front Page Award from the Newswomen’s Club of New York for their reporting on the rampant use of on-call shifts at Victoria’s Secret and elsewhere.

A few fun facts about Sapna. She comes from the same Connecticut town (East Lyme) as Emily Steel. And like Emily, she is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She also has a stage name: Punzi Scheme.

“I’m so good at making cheesy jokes that I once won the Punderdome 3000, a monthly pun competition in Brooklyn,” she says. “I’ll try to limit the groan-inducing humor during my first few months.”

She starts in August.