NY Times hires Bloomberg’s Weise to cover Amazon, Microsoft

New York Times technology editor Pui-Wing Tam sent out the following announcement on Wednesday:

Amazon, Microsoft, and two of the world’s richest people. That’s a lot for someone to cover. Thankfully we found the perfect person: Karen Weise, who is joining The New York Times as our Seattle tech correspondent.

Karen has been reporting on technology for the past few years in Seattle for Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek. She previously worked at the magazine in New York, writing about policy, consumer finance and housing. Before Bloomberg, she interned at ProPublica, worked in public radio in southern California, and was (briefly) a management consultant.

One of Karen’s most memorable stories was an expose in 2015 of Dan Price, the CEO of Seattle-based Gravity Payments, a credit card processing company. He had gained plenty of positive press for deciding to pay his employees a minimum of $70,000 a year. Karen’s reporting found that the mythology of Gravity was largely illusory and that the young chief’s motivations were far more complex than he had let on. She won a SABEW for the piece. Ellen Pollock, BizDay’s editor and who was a top editor at Businessweek when the story ran, said the tale was one of her favorites that year.

Karen plans to apply that same tenacity to the Seattle tech beat. Amazon and Microsoft are massive companies with tentacles in areas from entertainment to logistics to cloud computing to devices to … well, you name it. These companies have reshaped industries, how people live, communicate, entertain themselves and do business — and they have also yielded two of the world’s richest people, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates.

Karen, a graduate of Yale and U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism School, grew up in Los Angeles and traveled the world before settling in Seattle with her husband, Noah, and their young son. Since moving to the Pacific Northwest in 2014, she’s gone full Seattle, signing up for a salmon share, eschewing an umbrella and teaching her toddler how to “hike.”

Please welcome Karen to The Times. She starts at the end of the month.