Politico Europe hires economy, tech and media reporters

Politico announced Wednesday a number of new hires that will cover business and economics news from Europe.

Matthew Karnitschnig will spearhead coverage of German politics and the European economy. As chief Germany correspondent, Karnitschnig will head up its Berlin office. He comes to Politico after an outstanding 15-year run at the Wall Street Journal. Karnitschnig covered Central Europe from Vienna (his family is Austrian), worked in Frankfurt, and most recently was WSJ’s Berlin bureau chief and chief Europe correspondent.

In between his European tours he covered mergers and acquisitions, the most competitive beat at the Journal in New York; he was part of a team that won a Gerald Loeb Award for reporting on the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Since 2009, he has helped direct, edit and report the Journal’s coverage of the euro crisis from Berlin, for which the paper won a 2012 Overseas Press Club prize and was a Pulitzer finalist in 2011.

Planting the Politico flag in London is Alex Spence, its new European media correspondent. He’ll write about the personalities, economic forces, political fights and policy debates reshaping the media scene in Britain and on the Continent. Along with Westminster and the City of London, Fleet Street is one of the three poles of power in Britain. We couldn’t get a better journalist to cover it.

Spence owned this beat when he was the media editor at the Times of London. In his decade at that paper, he covered stories involving financial crime and corporate governance, including the legal battle royal of Russian oligarchs Roman Abramovich and the late Boris Berezovsky, turmoil at the Serious Fraud Office and the composition of Britain’s top boardrooms. He came to London from his native New Zealand, where his magazine stories on Islam in Indonesia, the horse-racing industry and clinical depression won several prizes.

David Meyer, who’ll be based in Berlin, joined last week as a European tech reporter. A South African native, Meyer got a dual degree in English and archeology in Cape Town, worked as a medical secretary and toy demonstrator, and aspired to rock stardom in London. He ended up doing some broadcast production work for the BBC and got into tech journalism with ZDNet, covering British telecoms for six years.

He became the European tech correspondent for Gigaom in 2012, exposing the dark side of the .io domain name and chronicling Google’s regulatory woes at the EU, which he’ll follow closely for us. He and his wife, a German national, live in Berlin.

On the tech beat in Brussels is Zoya Sheftalovich, who’s part of its Australian wave. Raised in Sydney, Sheftalovich was born in Chernovtsy, then in Soviet Ukraine, where she says she learned to “use my elbows.” She speaks Russian fluently. Down Under, Sheftalovich was a champion debater, a legal researcher, a political obsessive, an editor and an investigative reporter. For the past five years, she wrote and broke stories for CHOICE, the Australian Consumers Association.

Pitching in on the tech regulatory story is Nick Hirst, who becomes Politico’s competition policy reporter. He’ll cover the intersection of business and policy in Brussels. Hirst was a reporter at the European Voice and Mergermarket, a trade publication.

He began his professional career as a lawyer with degrees from the College of Europe, City University and Oxford. He can talk to lawyers like a lawyer — and write about them like a journalist. He has an English father, a French mother and since last month, an Argentinian wife.

Sara Stefanini joins our energy team in May, reporting to energy editor Jan Cienski and working alongside Kalina Oroschakoff. Currently based in London, Stefanini was the Asia Pacific editor at Interfax Energy. She’s the daughter of an Italian diplomat, grew up on several continents (including Australia) and went to college and graduate school in the U.S.