NY Times hires BuzzFeed’s Mac to cover tech accountability

New York Times business editor Ellen Pollock and deputy business editor Pui-Wing Tam sent out the following announcement on Thursday:

We’re thrilled to announce that Ryan Mac is joining The New York Times to cover tech accountability.

In his new role at The Times, Ryan will dig into all manner of tech companies, tech billionaires and their ecosystems of influence, and collaborate with reporters across the newsroom to examine the increasing power of the industry. Over the past decade, tech has reached a point globally — employing millions, serving billions and sitting atop a combined market value of trillions — where scrutiny of that power is needed more than ever.

Ryan has reported on tech through that lens for years. Since 2017, he has been a senior technology reporter at BuzzFeed, writing about corporate accountability at Facebook, Google, Tesla and other large companies. His work has revealed missteps and willful blindness at Facebook toward content issues, privacy failings that helped unearth President Biden’s Venmo account and Elon Musk’s legal shenanigans. This year, he won a Polk Award for his Facebook coverage; in 2019, his work was awarded a Mirror Award.

Before BuzzFeed, Ryan was a tech reporter at Forbes, where he got the scoop that Peter Thiel was secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against Gawker. Ryan also previously interned at Bloomberg News, The Orange County Register, The New York Times and the Half Moon Bay Review.

Ryan, a graduate of Stanford University, has long displayed a desire to get behind the scenes. While working at The Stanford Daily with Amy Julia Harris, who is now an investigative reporter in Metro, the two broke a story on how Stanford athletes had access to a special list of classes widely regarded as easy. Years later, she asked him how he got such good details for his stories. Ryan’s secret? He attended retirement and goodbye parties to make new sources.

Ryan is also an avid fan of football (not the American kind) and tweets extensively about his favorite team (Arsenal). He and his cat, Cricket, will be based in Los Angeles, and Ryan will make frequent trips to the San Francisco bureau. He starts in July.

Please join us in welcoming Ryan to The Times.