Insider has added 19 staffers to its roster

Insider global managing editor Jessica Liebman sent out the following email to the staff on Friday:

Happy Friday, everyone!

We’re growing our newsroom and expanding our teams nearly every week. While we do this, we’re making sure to bring on extremely talented journalists who can help us broaden our perspective and elevate our storytelling. Below, we wanted to highlight some of the people we recently added to the team — or will be adding in the coming weeks.

Take five minutes today and read about your new and soon-to-be colleagues!

Best,

Jess

Alison Brower joins Insider as LA bureau chief for business, reporting to Alyson Shontell. She was most recently the deputy editor for arts and entertainment at the Los Angeles Times, where she spearheaded business and cultural coverage as well as investigative features. As deputy editorial director at the Hollywood Reporter from 2014 to 2019, she was the architect of the magazine’s Power 100 and other high-profile packages, power lists, and special projects.

Bianca Chan joins Insider as a finance reporter. Previously she was an editor at a B2B publication covering technology, automation, and innovation within financial services, and, before that, she wrote about auto finance, arts and entertainment, and local news. Bianca is originally from Vancouver, Canada, and studied journalism in Ottawa before returning to the Pacific Northwest.

Michael Cogley joins Insider as associate tech editor in London. Previously he was a tech correspondent at The Telegraph where he broke stories and wrote a variety of in-depth features and interviews covering the likes of fintech, EVs, and the rise of alt tech. After graduating in 2015, he spent over four years working as a business reporter in the biggest newspapers in Ireland, including the Sunday Independent and The Times. He studied journalism at Dublin City University, where he served as editor-in-chief of its student newspaper.

Bradford William Davis joins Insider as a reporter on the investigations desk. He previously worked as a columnist for the New York Daily News, providing enterprise reporting, essaying, and investigations on sports subjects beyond the box score. His work on Major League Baseball’s engagement with racial justice in the wake of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd earned him a 2020 Best Contemporary Baseball Commentary Award from the Society for American Baseball Research. Davis has been featured in The Washington Post, NBC News, and twice in the Baseball Prospectus Annual.

Tom Dotan joins Insider as a senior correspondent covering the gig economy. He previously worked at The Information, where he was one of its first employees, covering a variety of topics including social media, advertising, and the streaming-media revolution. He also launched its official podcast, “The Information’s 411.” Before that, he worked at the Los Angeles Business Journal covering the LA tech scene, including writing some of the first stories about Snapchat and Tinder.

Karen K. Ho is Insider’s senior reporter covering the business of sustainability. Before this she was the global finance and economics reporter at Quartz. She has also covered the media industry, entertainment, business, and crime for the Columbia Journalism Review, Time, GQ, Interview, Toronto Life, Vox, and other outlets. Karen is from Toronto, worked more than three years as a bilingual bank teller, and received her master’s degree in business from Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism.

Ryan Joe joins us as advertising editor. He was most recently the managing editor at AdExchanger, where he helped steer its coverage of the digital media and advertising industry. He’s been examining the challenges, practices, and business of data-driven marketing for nearly a decade. In his coverage, Ryan has strived to make the increasingly complicated world of digital media understandable and accessible.

Anders Kapur joins Insider as a senior managing producer based in New York. Previously he was a video producer and editor for Deadspin, where his work on short-form documentaries garnered film-festival selections, coverage from the BBC, and a Webby Award nomination.

Isabelle Lee joins Insider as a markets reporter. Before moving to New York, she was an on-air stock market reporter and a television producer in the Philippines’ biggest network. She was also a part of a George Peabody Award-winning program where she documented social issues in remote regions in the Philippines. Isabelle holds an MS in journalism and an MA in international affairs from Columbia University. While in grad school, she had stints with CNN and Bloomberg.

Bethany McLean joins Insider as special correspondent. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair and an editor at large at Fortune, she is the host of the podcast “Making a Killing” and the cohost of the podcast “Capitalisn’t.” Her books include “The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron” and “All the Devils are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.” She has also published two mini-books, one on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and one on fracking, with Columbia Global Reports.

Tekendra Parmar joins Insider as a tech editor, freelance. He has previously written for Time, Fortune, and The Nation, among other publications, and, before moving to the United States, worked in Hong Kong and New Delhi. Over the past year, he has helped build Rest of World, a publication that covers the intersection of technology and society in non-Western countries. His reporting for Rest of World on the mental-health issues of Facebook’s graphic-content moderators in the Philippines and India was recently long-listed for a One World Media award.

Vishal Persaud joins Insider as a startups and venture-capital editor. He was previously the venture capital and technology editor at PitchBook News, where he helped to jump-start the team’s enterprise reporting efforts. Before that he spent over four years as an editor for Bloomberg’s breaking news and data-driven news teams, working on projects to improve the newsroom’s use of data in stories. He’s also had stints at the real-time-information startup Dataminr and NBC. As a writer, he has worked for several local newspapers in New York, New Jersey, and Florida.

Mark Reeth is an associate investing editor at Insider, helping the Investing team write entertaining and informative articles about the stock market, finance, and all things investing. He started at Insider in April. He was previously a contributing writer at US News & World Report, where he wrote about anything to do with finance. Before that, Mark was a writer and editor at The Motley Fool, where he covered the tech, telecom, and consumer-goods industries.

Nazar Risafi joins Insider as a video producer on the development team and will work out of London. He was previously a broadcast video producer at the Alaraby TV Network, where he created broadcast and digital-video explainers for news bulletins and social-media platforms as a one-man team. Nazar has an extensive history in technical and editorial television as well as digital production in Arabic and English.

Justin Rood joins Insider as an investigative correspondent. He is a longtime investigator and journalist, with a background in politics, scandals, and Washington, DC. Before joining Insider, Justin was a Senate committee investigator and trained Hill investigators from both parties. Before his work with Congress, Justin was an investigative producer at ABC News, where he helped break the DC Madam scandal and wrote for Talking Points Memo’s TPMMuckraker.

Kumutha Ramanathan is an award-winning journalist who will be joining our team in the UK as an investing reporter. From Toronto to New York and now London, she has covered murders, protests, floods, hostage takedowns and many other dramatic events for top global new agencies. Her investigative feature on gay and illegal migrants in the US led to her being awarded a first place prize for reporting by the South Asian Journalists Association in 2012. After moving to London almost a decade ago, she chose to specialize in business news, working as a reporter and producer for Bloomberg News as well as a business correspondent for World Finance.

Mattathias Schwartz joins Insider as senior correspondent reporting to Eric Bates. As a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he has profiled some of Washington’s most controversial officials, including John Brennan, Mike Pompeo, and Bill Barr. The first Times journalist to note the existence of 4chan, his reporting on online culture has been cited by hundreds of books and academic articles, as well as Merriam-Webster’s definition of the word “troll.” A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit he filed resulted in the release of a video showing the shooting deaths of four Indigenous Miskito citizens of Honduras during an operation led by the Drug Enforcement Administration. A former staff writer for The New Yorker and a former term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, he is the recipient of the Livingston Award for International Reporting.

Anna Silman joins Insider as a senior features reporter, reporting to Dana Schuster. She spent the past five years as a senior writer at The Cut at New York Magazine, where she was a generalist writing features, profiles, and essays on a wide variety of topics including culture, lifestyle, media, health, identity, and social behavior. Last year, she spent four months developing NY Mag’s “Diary of a Hospital” series profiling frontline workers through COVID’s peak, and she published numerous features exploring the social dynamics of the pandemic. She has also worked on audio stories for The Cut’s podcasts with Gimlet and Vox Media, including reporting, writing, and coproducing a feature on women in the far-right movement.

Brittany Stephanis joins Insider as a senior producer. She spent the last eight months freelancing for the news and documentary team. Previously, she was a video producer at New York magazine, where she handled pre- and post-production across verticals, including The Cut and Vulture. Brittany is originally from New Jersey and studied broadcast and digital journalism at Syracuse University.