Quartz hires Gina Chon, former WSJ reporter

Quartz editor in chief Kevin Delaney sent out the following staff announcement on Monday morning:

I’m very pleased to welcome Gina Chon as our new corporate reporter.

Gina comes to us following seven years at The Wall Street Journal, where she did a remarkable job in some of the most prominent and challenging reporting posts at the newspaper.

Gina most recently covered mergers and acquisitions, with scoops that included the $30 billion sale of Medco, the $20 billion sale of Genzyme, and American Airlines’ status as a merger target. Among other things, she contributed to a series of scoops on the backstory of the Facebook IPO, and Yahoo’s search for new board members.

From 2007 to 2009, Gina was the Journal’s sole reporter in Iraq, overseeing 10 local Iraqi staff and producing a stream of thoughtful reports for the paper, including her scoop about anti-American cleric Moqtada al-Sadr disarming his militia. On her return from Baghdad, Gina covered the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake, working with Zach to chronicle on Facebook and a blog one man’s search for his family that was later published as a page one story.

Gina started with the Journal in 2005 in Detroit, where she would help break the news on Chrysler being sold to Cerberus. Prior to that, she wrote a book about the Khmer Rouge, trained Iraqi journalists, worked for AsiaWeek and Fortune in Seoul, was an editor at The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and reported and edited for the Associated Press. Gina speaks Korean, along with some French and Arabic.

At Quartz, Gina will lead our growing coverage of businesses and their leaders. We’re looking to her to spot the most interesting and important corporate stories for our global readership, and apply her world-class reporting skills and expert analysis. We expect Gina will help us build out our Quartz obsessions over time, and also profile and track key people leading or being sidelined by business disruption.

Smart journalism, unique analysis, digital flair and a global worldview are at the core of our efforts to create a new kind of business news outlet. Gina, along with some other new members of the Quartz reporting team that I expect to announce in the coming weeks, will help build on the great, creative work you have all done so far, and the global readership it has attracted beyond our expectations.

Please join me in welcoming Gina. I trust you will find her an exceptional journalist and colleague, and encourage you to work with her closely.

Chon left the Journal last summer after admitting to a violation of the paper’s ethics code.