Recode hires Inc.’s Townsend to cover Google

Recode editor in chief Dan Frommer sent out the following announcement to the staff on Thursday:

Recode,

I’m excited to announce our newest addition: Tess Townsend will join our team in early January in the San Francisco office.

Tess will focus on covering all things Google and Alphabet, plus related topics, and the emerging business of artificial intelligence. She joins us from Inc., where she broadly covered tech news, including a recent focus on Facebook’s fake news problem.

Before Inc., Tess worked at a non-profit regional newspaper called The Day in New London, CT, where one of her projects won an investigative journalism award. She has done reporting stints in California’s Central Valley and rural New Mexico, and notes that she has worked at a newspaper with no website — The Sacramento Valley Mirror in Willows, CA.

Tess studied English lit at UC Berkeley, and lived in China for a year after college, teaching English and studying Mandarin. (She notes, she “did not master Chinese, but I tried really hard.”)

She starts on Jan. 3. In the meantime, please follow her on Twitter at @tess_townsend.

Please join me in welcoming Tess!

Dan