NY Times hires Conger to cover tech

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

We’re pleased to announce that Kate Conger is joining The New York Times as a general assignment technology reporter. She will be based in San Francisco

Kate was most recently at Gizmodo, where she covered tech policy and cybersecurity. She was previously at TechCrunch reporting on the same beat, and earlier worked at Ratter, where she helped start three local news sites and edited all of them. She began in journalism with SF Weekly and The San Francisco Examiner.

At Gizmodo, Kate was at the forefront of chronicling the employee activism that has emerged at some of the largest tech companies. She was the first to publish the controversial memo from the then-Google employee James Damore on perceived gender differences. She broke news of employee dissatisfaction at Google over the company’s artificial intelligence work with the Pentagon. And she has written on a wide range of other subjects, including Uber, encryption and political data breaches.

Kate will be working closely with other tech reporters to write about a myriad of topics — from Uber to Twitter to the continuation of employee activism — as Silicon Valley and other West Coast tech companies continue to sprout new innovations that lead to unintended consequences. Kate knows many of her new colleagues because she competed with them — including Sheera Frenkel and Mike Isaac — all of whom call her “ferocious.”

Please welcome Kate to The Times. She starts next week.