NYT assistant biz editor moving to San Francisco

New York Times business editor Dean Murphy sent out the following announcement on Friday afternoon:

This is a bad news/good news announcement.

First the bad news: The BizDay backfield is about to lose the guy who keeps the M&M dispenser fully stocked.

OK, the M&M supply is not really what makes Vindu Goel so valuable to us, but it does help explain why Vindu will be so missed. He is a tremendous caretaker of all things BizDay: acting as a fierce proponent for his reporters and their work, backstopping his fellow editors, multitasking without complaint (he is now filling in as an acting deputy tech editor), lifting our report day in and day out with smart suggestions and questions – and even sugaring up our midday energy slumps.

The good news? Vindu is leaving the backfield to take up a reporting job in our San Francisco bureau, where he will join the technology team. Though Vindu has been an editor since joining The Times in 2008, he had been an editorial writer and then a business-page columnist and blogger at the San Jose Mercury News, covering such topics as the Microsoft-Yahoo merger battle and entrepreneurs’ quest to produce fuel from algae. He was also a business reporter at the Wall Street Journal and the Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Above all, Vindu knows technology like few others. He not only served as the principal editor for the Bits blog when we ramped up our technology coverage under Damon Darlin, he also lived and breathed Silicon Valley for nine years when he worked at the Mercury News, including a stint running that paper’s business news operation, focusing on technology, the hometown industry. He directed the Merc’s award-winning coverage of the Hewlett-Packard/Compaq merger fight, the Google IPO, the Microsoft antitrust trial and the boom and bust of Silicon Valley’s economy.

“Vindu has boundless energy, unwavering enthusiasm and an incredible encyclopedic brain containing vast knowledge about tech,” says Damon, now international business editor. “He also has an amazing Rolodex – if I may use that old-fashioned metaphor – of talented young writers. He has helped us bring in some of the tech team’s best reporters.”

Vindu will be moving to San Francisco this summer. In the meantime, he will continue to be engaged in our tech coverage as an acting deputy to Suzanne Spector, while also helping vet his successor in New York: He is now fielding applications for assistant business editor, M&M operations.