NYTimes names Tam its new technology editor

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

Cybersecurity breaches. Billion-dollar start-ups. A flourishing on-demand economy. Staggering personal wealth. And cocky corporate behemoths, including one enroute to an unprecedented market value of $1 trillion. There is no more compelling or exciting business story than Silicon Valley and the broader world of technology, as our ace team of tech reporters and editors demonstrate over and over again.

Now we are about to take our coverage up another notch.

Pui-Wing Tam, one the most talented and intrepid journalists in Silicon Valley, is joining BizDay as our new technology editor. Pui-Wing has been running Bloomberg’s technology coverage in San Francisco for the past two years, after nearly two decades at The Wall Street Journal in New York, San Francisco and Hong Kong.

As a reporter, Pui-Wing is probably best known for having been responsible for the downfall of Carly Fiorina as CEO of Hewlett-Packard in 2005 – and for the extraordinary events that followed. Ms. Fiorina launched an investigation into who might have leaked information to Pui-Wing, and the rest is Silicon Valley infamy. HP’s investigators used the last four digits of her Social Security number to obtain her phone records, they reviewed videotape of her on the job, and they monitored the trash at her home. “Whether the sleuths ever encountered my toddler’s dirty diapers, HP said it doesn’t know,” Pui-Wing later wrote after the company came clean about the surveillance.

That was a heady time in Silicon Valley. With deputy editors Jim Kerstetter and Joe Plambeck, Pui-Wing takes charge of our technology coverage at another ascendant moment for the industry, as tech companies increasingly dominate the economy, business, media, the home, workplace, and virtually every aspect of life. And surveillance, of a different sort, is again a topic at the center of the tech story.

Pui-Wing brings the knowledge of an accomplished reporter, but also the deft hand of an experienced editor. Before moving to Bloomberg in 2013, she was The Journal’s deputy bureau chief in San Francisco for eight years, helping to manage a dozen reporters who covered Silicon Valley companies, consumer electronics, business technology as well as the environment and general news in the West. At Bloomberg, she runs 15 tech reporters and editors.

Raised in Hong Kong and Tokyo, Pui-Wing started at The Journal in Hong Kong before moving to New York to cover the mutual fund industry and then technology. She has an undergraduate degree in modern history from Oxford and a master’s in journalism from Columbia.

She lives in the Bay Area with her husband and children, and will be based in San Francisco. She starts next month.