NY Times India tech/biz reporter Goel joins audience team

Hannah Poferl, audience director at The New York Times, sent out the following announcement on Tuesday:

We’re pleased to announce that Vindu Goel will be joining the Audience team as an emerging platforms editor after two and a half years as our technology and business correspondent in India.

In his new role, Vindu, along with Mitch Dozois, will oversee our emerging platforms strategy. He will focus much of his attention on how The New York Times can reach and engage more international readers — both through established social media services like Facebook and Twitter, as well as through platforms that we have yet to crack, such as messaging services like WhatsApp and Telegram.

Vindu has a reporter’s-eye view of the world’s biggest social platforms that makes him uniquely qualified for this position.

During his time in India, Vindu wrote about the crucial role that WhatsApp and Facebook play in India’s elections and how Facebook broke its promise to stop hate speech against Rohingya Muslim refugees.

He chronicled the country’s pattern of shutting down the internet to stifle dissent, particularly in Kashmir, and described how the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has tried to control the news media.

He was also an eager participant in new forms of storytelling to engage our digital audience, including a tap-through story on how WhatsApp messages incited mobs to murder innocent people and a popular photo essay on how Amazon got packages to customers at the top of the world.

Prior to heading overseas, he covered Apple, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other tech companies in our San Francisco bureau. He started at The Times in 2008 as a backfield editor on the Business desk, where he worked on the early social media and reader engagement efforts of the Bits technology blog and later oversaw energy, workplace and auto coverage.

Vindu will be based in the Bay Area and report to Anna.

Before joining The Times, Vindu held a variety of positions at The San Jose Mercury News in Silicon Valley, including business editor and columnist. Earlier, he reported for The Wall Street Journal in Philadelphia and The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, covering everything from corporate takeover battles to corruption in the Ohio legislature. He is a graduate of Harvard.