Quartz adds six to its newsroom

Quartz editor-in-chief Katherine Bell has announced six new additions to the newsroom this spring.

Leslie Nguyen-Okwu joins the Asia team as a reporter based in Taipei; Carlos Mureithi joins Quartz Africa as a reporter based in Nairobi; Clarisa Diaz joins the Things team as a reporter based in New York City; Camille Squires joins as a reporter covering cities, based in San Francisco; Priyanka Vora joins as an audience editor based in New York; and Scott Nover joins as an emerging industries reporter based in Washington.

Nguyen-Okwu moved to Taiwan in 2017 and has freelanced for Ozy and other publications writing about Taiwan’s angst, comic relief and food, feminism in Vietnam, and Silicon Valley’s speechwriters. She’s also stepped on the other side of the divide as an executive speechwriter herself. Before moving to Asia, she reported on tech in Silicon Valley and beyond after completing a degree in international relations from Stanford. She speaks Vietnamese and Igbo, and is working on her Mandarin.

Mureithi joins Quartz Africa from the Daily Nation in Nairobi, where he was an online editor reporting on business, human rights, the environment, culture and the arts. His work has also been featured in Quartz, the New York Times, Al Jazeera and Reuters, reporting from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Mexico, and South Africa. He has a BA in journalism from the United States International University in Nairobi and a master’s from the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where he was a Mastercard Foundation scholar. A native of Kenya, he speaks fluent Swahili and Kikuyu.

Diaz comes to Quartz from New York Public Radio where she reported, wrote, designed, and coded for WNYC and Gothamist. Her coverage of New York City’s effort to shut down peaker plants was recognized with a Front Page Award in 2020. In 2017, she won an Edward R. Murrow Award with her colleagues at WNYC for Harlem Heat, a project that engaged with the community to put sensors in their homes to directly collect data on heat and humidity there. Prior to journalism, she performed research in Santiago as a Fulbright Scholar and worked as a designer and architect in Phnom Penh and Shanghai.

Squires joins as a reporter covering cities, based in San Francisco. Prior to joining Quartz, Camille was a Fact Checker at New York Magazine, and before that was a reporter and assistant editor with City Monitor, a digital publication focused on cities. She has also spent time as a fellow at Mother Jones, teaching English in Argentina, and managing hardware supply chains at McMaster-Carr. Camille studied political science at Georgetown and received a master’s in journalism from DePaul University. Camille starts in mid-June and will report to Things team leader David Yanofsky.

Vora joins Quartz as an audience editor based in New York. She was most recently a social media manager at GZero Media, and has also worked in audience engagement at Business Insider, the Financial Times, and Axios. Before getting involved in audience work, Priyanka covered health, science, and business out of Mumbai for outlets that include the Hindustan Times, Scroll, and Quartz India. She also worked on an Emmy-nominated documentary on social and economic inequity in New York City. Priyanka studied communications and law at the University of Mumbai and received a master’s in journalism from New York University. She starts in mid-May, reporting to Executive Editor Kira Bindrim.

Nover joins as an emerging industries reporter, based in Washington DC. Prior to joining Quartz, Scott covered social media platforms for Adweek, and has written about media, tech, and politics for The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, Vox, Fortune, and Slate. He also writes a Substack about speech and press freedom called Pressing. Nover has a bachelor’s in political communication and a master’s in media from George Washington University. He starts at the end of May, reporting to deputy emerging industries editor Michael J. Coren.