Longtime biz journalist Takahashi leaving Mercury News

Dean Takahashi, a business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News, said goodbye to readers Monday on his Tech Talk blog.

He’s going to work for VentureBeat, a blog founded by former Mercury News business journalist Matt Marshall.

Takahashi wrote, “I will be working out of my home, preferably in my warm-ups, and will still try to keep my finger on the pulse of what’s interesting in Silicon Valley. Our coverage will covering startups in the digital media space, including video games, but it will also include important digital media developments at companies such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Electronic Arts, and Apple. Thus, it’s not limited to the startup world. I’m still not sure what we’re going to call it. Maybe some crowdsourcing could help us come up with a name.

“In the meantime, I’d like to thank everyone for reading this blog and contributing your comments ever since I started it in January, 2006. It’s 1,000 posts later and I have to say that it was a great way to enhance the things that I wrote for the newspaper and a venue to expand my interests beyond what I could write about in the video game blog. I’d also like to thank all of my colleagues.”

Read more here.

Takahashi has been a business journalist for 18 years, having written for the Wall Street Journal, Red Herring magazine, Los Angeles Times, The Orange County Register, and Dallas Times Herald, and has appeared on CNN and CNBC. As a die-hard gamer, he is author of the book “Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft’s Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution.”