LinkedIn hires Wired’s Hempel as senior editor at large

LinkedIn has hired Wired senior editor Jessi Hempel as a senior editor at large.

On LinkedIn, Hempel writes that she will continue to “explore the set of ideas that has driven my reporting for the past 15 years — the way technology is upending our lives and shifting the way we live and work.”

She added:

But 25 years after I got my first AOL address, most traditional publications still haven’t figured out how to make good on this opportunity. For years, they have endeavored to build commenting into stories in a way that extends the value of the work —creating a digital version of the physical office water cooler around which people gather to exchange ideas. But the benefit of that water cooler is that it offers physical and contextual proximity:-everyone knows and trusts each other enough to cultivate civil conversation while refilling our glasses. That’s largely missing from the internet.

Not at LinkedIn. Over the last 15 years, the platform has built a trusted network of 575 million professionals who visit throughout the week  to get better at what they do or what they want to do. A key part of achieving that success involves staying informed and sharing their own insights with their communities on where the world is going. One of the key ways they do both is by following LinkedIn’s fast-growing body of editorial work: posts, articles, videos, pushes and trending-news packages created and curated by a 50-plus person editorial staff.

Hempel has been at Wired since 2014. She has worked for BusinessWeek, Fortune and Conde Nast’s Backchannel.