NY Times names deputy tech editor

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following announcement to the staff on Tuesday:

As The Times moves to become an even more authoritative force in consumer technology, we have terrific news: Molly Wood, recently of the CBS-owned tech website CNET, is coming to Business Day as a deputy technology editor with primary responsibility for our consumer tech coverage.

In addition to helping us shape that coverage, Molly will review products, appear in videos, write a column (Tool Kit for starters) and more generally keep us at the cutting edge of consumer tech  in print, on Bits, on social media – anywhere and everywhere our readers can be engaged.

Molly, who has been covering personal technology from Silicon Valley for 13 years, is a technocrat without sounding like one. “I’m the fun geek at the party,” she says. “I bring life to technology, because I’m actually passionate about it.”

Times readers got a taste of Molly’s work when she was a guest columnist last month for “State of the Art.” She wrote about the new Mac Pro, the high-end ($8,000 plus) desktop, which Apple loaned to her for the review. “For the moment, I am living the life of a tech one-percenter,” Molly wrote. Her takeaway?  “In car terms, the new Mac Pro is like a Ferrari or a Maserati. It’s gorgeous, sexy and powerful, and a few rich people will probably buy one in order to go fast. But that doesn’t mean it could cut it in Formula One.”

Molly is best known as the host of “Buzz Out Loud,” a daily CNET podcast and webcast, as the executive producer and host of “Always On with Molly Wood,” a weekly half-hour review show, and as a consumer tech commentator at a blog appropriately named “Molly Rants.” She’s run a half marathon to test wearable fitness devices, jumped from a plane snapping photos from a smartphone, and tested a phone’s durability by crushing it with grapes barefoot in Napa Valley. In 2012, she was a finalist for an ASME online magazine award for her blog commentaries.

Molly got her start in journalism in her home state of Montana working for the Associated Press in the state capital, and later dabbled in sports writing during an A.P. stint in Omaha (she covered Huskers basketball and the College World Series baseball tournament). She had a short run as a magazine writer at MacHome Journal, a now-defunct monthly that focused on Apple technology, before moving to CNET, where she worked with our own Jim Kerstetter, a deputy tech editor in San Francisco.

Molly, who will also be based in San Francisco, will work closely with Jim and Farhad Manjoo, our new State of the Art columnist, as well as Joe Plambeck, our deputy tech editor in New York, and Ashwin Seshagiri, tech’s web producer.  Molly starts at the end of the month.