NewYorker.com hires business editor

Vauhini Vara will be the NewYorker.com’s new business editor, starting Monday, July 29, it was announced Tuesday by NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson.

Vara will oversee the expansion of The Business Pages, the magazine’s online hub for business coverage and commentary, which launched in February of this year.

“Vauhini is everything we want in a business reporter: she breaks news, files F.O.I.A. requests, and writes beautifully,” Thompson said in a statement.  “I’ve always wanted someone who can cover the S.E.C. and who has also studied literary fiction. She’ll do a great job in further expanding our rapidly growing business coverage on newyorker.com.”

Vara’s hire is a continuation of the over-all expansion of the site, which has included hiring Matt Buchanan to oversee the launch of the Science and Tech hub, and Michael Agger and Sasha Weiss to expand the site’s cultural coverage, as well as bringing Andy Borowitz’s immensely popular satirical news blog, The Borowitz Report, to the site. This enhanced coverage has resulted in record-breaking traffic for newyorker.com, which recently reached 10.7 million monthly unique visitors.

Vara comes from the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the tech industry and Silicon Valley businesses, and where she most recently covered California politics. She is a graduate of Stanford University, with a B.A. in international relations and economics, and a 2010 graduate of the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop, with an M.F.A in creative writing.