Semafor hires four for business and tech news

News startup has hired four additional staffers for business and finance coverage.

Gina Chon has been hired as business and tech editor.

Chon is currently a columnist for Reuters Breakingviews based in San Francisco, where she writes about the tech industry and related policy issues. She was previously based in Washington, D.C. and wrote opinion pieces about the economy, trade and regulation. She joined Breakingviews in 2016 from the Financial Times, where she was the enforcement and regulatory correspondent covering white-collar crime and cyber security.

Before that, Chon was the corporate reporter for Quartz and spent seven years at the Wall Street Journal in New York, Baghdad and Detroit, writing about M&A, the Iraq war and the auto industry. She also has written a book about the Khmer Rouge, trained journalists in Iraq and written from her native Seoul. She received the 2017 Reuters Journalist of the Year award for commentary for her columns about the Trump administration.

Liz Hoffman has been hired as business and finance editor.

Hoffman is a senior reporter in New York, covering Wall Street for The Wall Street Journal. She joined the Journal in 2013 covering mergers and acquisitions and broke news on some of the biggest corporate tie-ups of all time, including Burger King and Tim Horton’s, Baker Hughes and Halliburton, Dell and EMC, and a hostile bid for Hershey’s, her hometown corporate titan.

She later covered investment banking, producing a string of front-page articles and scoops on Goldman Sachs’s push into Main Street, the travails of the world’s largest venture capital fund, and the coronavirus pandemic’s toll on financial markets.

Bradley Saacks has been hired as a reporter.

Saacks covered hedge funds for Business Insider for more than three years before leaving in June to become content director for 3i, a new private community of investors with access to a unique deal flow.

Before Business Insider, he spent the two years and three months at Ignites, the Financial Times’ mutual fund news branch, where he reported on sales, distribution and marketing in the mutual fund world.

He interned at Bloomberg News and the Austin American-Statesman in college. He is a UNC-Chapel Hill graduate in journalism.

Louise Matsakis has been hired as a tech reporter.

She has been on the NBC News tech investigations team, covering Amazon and TikTok. She has been at Rest of World as senior editor covering technology. She also worked at Wired this year.

She writes predominantly about technology and the internet. She’s mostly interested in major tech companies such as Apple and Google, cyberlaw, the automation of social media, and online communities. She used to be an editor at Motherboard, VICE Media’s technology and science site. Before that, she was an editor at Mashable.

Semafor previously hired Reed Albergotti as its technology editor.