Marketwatch names new tech coverage staffers

Business news web site MarketWatch.com named Therese Poletti as technology columnist and Benjamin Pimentel as technology reporter.

Poletti, an award-winning staff writer at the San Jose Mercury News for the last seven years, will deliver breaking news commentary to MarketWatch.com’s audience of institutional and retail investors while providing views of large, ongoing news topics in technology. Pimentel, previously a reporter with 14 years of experience at the San Francisco Chronicle, will cover manufacturers and fabrication equipment vendors in the semiconductor industry.

“Therese, one of the best-known technology reporters in the nation, has been a driving force in Silicon Valley news for more than a decade while Ben has made an indelible mark at one of the premier technology news sources,” said David Callaway, editor-in-chief of MarketWatch.

“Our strong technology team has just gotten even stronger, and as we redesign our tech section to give those stories more prominence, we couldn’t be happier to bring Therese’s byline and Ben’s depth of reporting experience to our team.”

Poletti covered technology trends, companies and culture in Silicon Valley at the Mercury News. She covered the Hewlett-Packard boardroom scandal and the stock options backdating investigations, and was the lead reporter on the proxy battle at HP and later on the ouster of former HP CEO Carly Fiorina. Poletti broke the story that Intel was working on an alternative to its Itanium chip to better compete with AMD.

Pimentel covered business, technology and Silicon Valley at the San Francisco Chronicle and produced podcast reports for the paper’s web site, SFGate.com. He most recently served as a public relations manager at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He previously served as co-anchor at Balitang America, a weekly newscast geared to the Filipino community in North America, and contributed radio commentaries about the Philippines and the Asian American community to Pacific Time on KQED-FM.