Fortune hires eight for soon-to-be-relaunched website

Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer sent out the following staff hire announcement on Tuesday:

The Fortune.com staff is growing bigger! We are pleased to announce a number of important new editorial hires — writers and editors in London, San Francisco, and New York. We are getting closer to being fully staffed for our upcoming launch of the all-new Fortune.com and we’re thrilled to add such a wide range of expertise to our roster. Please join Megan and me in welcoming this talented group to the growing Fortune team.

Verne Kopytoff, senior editor in San Francisco, starts April 28. A veteran Silicon Valley reporter, Verne will be an editor on the expanded online news desk while also regularly filing stories on the tech beat. He spent nearly a decade at the San Francisco Chronicle covering Google’s rapid ascent, the emergence of social media and the challenges faced by companies like Yahoo. Later, as a contract reporter for the New York Times, he covered executive upheavals at major companies like Hewlett-Packard, profiled industry leaders including AOL’s Tim Armstrong and detailed the tech world’s embarrassing failure to offer functioning Wi-Fi at its own conferences. Verne has been a Fortune.com contributor for a couple of years. He’s also written extensively for Time, BusinessWeek and MIT Technology Review. When not following tech news, Verne can usually be found on a tennis court.

Geoff Smith, senior editor in London, will start on May 19.Geoff joins after nearly 20 years with Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal in London, Frankfurt, Vienna and Moscow. He also spent a year as an investment bank strategist in Kiev, Ukraine. A languages graduate of Keble College, Oxford, he speaks German, French and Russian. Geoff is married with a daughter, aged 15 months, and a baby boy is imminently expected. In the days when he still had free time, he devoted it to skiing, cookery, cricket and diving, all with more enthusiasm than skill.

Phil Wahba, a writer covering retail and consumer brands, will start on May 27.Phil joins us from Reuters, where he has spent nearly five years covering the retail and consumer beat, including the J.C. Penney, Barnes & Noble and Avon sagas. Prior to that, he was on the Reuters teams covering the 2009 car bankruptcies and 2008 financial crisis. Before joining Reuters, he was a regular contributor to the New York Sun’s business section, and his work appeared in publications such as the Houston Chronicle, Portfolio, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Phil worked as a trade commissioner for the Canadian Consulate in New York for 11 years before deciding to go into journalism. He is a native of Montreal, holds a Master’s degree from Columbia University’s journalism school, an MBA from the University of Ottawa and is a CFA charterholder. He is an obsessive runner and is 14 states into a quest to run a marathon in each state.

Also, these five talented reporters will join Fortune.com on May 5:

Ben Geier: Ben joins from Auto Finance News, where he was an associate editor and reporter covering the auto finance space. Ben is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism (2011).

Tom Huddleston Jr.: Tom is currently a staff reporter for the daily website of The American Lawyer magazine, where he writes about the legal side of big financial transactions. He earned a master’s degree in journalism from Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications in 2010.

John Kell: John has worked in various roles at the Wall Street Journal since April 2007, most recently as a reporter on the Journal’s Real-Time News team, where he covered breaking corporate and market news for WSJ.com, blogs and newswire service.

Laura Lorenzetti: Laura recently completed an internship at Bloomberg News, where she covered M&A, breaking news on IPOs and wrote data-driven analytical pieces on potential takeover targets as part of the daily Real M&A column. She’s a recent graduate of CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism (2013).

Benjamin Snyder: Ben is a former editorial intern with Fortune (summer 2010) who will graduate from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism this May. Before school, Ben wrote freelance articles for a number of publications, including the New York Times.