NYT hires two for tech beat

New York Times tech editor Damon Darlin and business editor Larry Ingrassia sent out the following staff hire announcement:

We are pleased to announce the hiring of two reporters for the Business Day technology team. Nicole Perlroth and Brian X. Chen will be joining the staff to write for the expanded Bits blog as well as for the paper.

Nicole comes to us from Forbes, where she covers Silicon Valley startups and venture capitalists. She has been responsible for Forbes’s Midas List, an annual ranking of top dealmakers in tech and life science venture capital. She wrote cover stories on technology investors Jim Breyer and Peter Thiel. She will be based in the San Francisco bureau and will report primarily on computer security and privacy issues.

Nicole, who grew up in Silicon Valley, is a 2004 graduate of Princeton, majoring in political science and Near Eastern studies, and also received an M.A. in journalism from Stanford University. She began her journalism career doing research for Philip Taubman, the former Times editor and investigative reporter.

She spends a lot of her free time under water and recently overcame a deep-seated fear of sharks by swimming from Alcatraz Island to San Francisco.

Brian most recently worked at Wired.com, where he wrote about mobile phones. He delved so deeply into the subject that a book emerged, “Always On,” about how the smartphone revolution has transformed society, business and culture. Brian will be bringing that knowledge and perspective to his reporting on the mobile devices and the wireless industry beat from New York.

Brian, a 2006 graduate of the University of California, Davis, started his career in the gadget labs of Macworld magazine and has also written for Details and the Atlantic. He is also writing the script for a documentary on electronic waste in Africa and the repair technicians there who convert the junk into workable devices.

He says that his parents didn’t give him a middle name, so he adopted the X, which he says stands for Xavier.

Please join us in welcoming Nicole and Brian to the staff.