Seattle Times hires Hellmann to cover AI

Seattle Times business editor Rami Grunbaum sent out the following announcement to the staff:

We’re excited to welcome Melissa Hellmann as a business reporter to lead our special project covering artificial intelligence for the next year. Among her other skills, Melissa instantly increases the biz staff’s knowledge of Mandarin a thousandfold.

She comes to us most recently from the Seattle Weekly, where she wrote about everything from labor and immigration to city government and homelessness.

In earlier incarnations, she wrote for Yes! Magazine; covered the legislature, education and the prison system for the Associated Press in Kansas; worked as an intern for Time magazine in Hong Kong; and freelanced in Shanghai for a range of publications.

She’s a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh as well as UC Berkeley’s J School.

The Seattle Times recently won a grant from the Harvard-MIT Ethics and Governance of AI Initiative to undertake a 12-month project exploring the social and economic impacts of artificial intelligence, both here in this hub of AI and more broadly. Melissa will spearhead that effort, which will include a series of enterprise stories as well as spot news coverage, and a variety of engagement and outreach efforts.