SF Chronicle biz editor Thomas joining Protocol as senior editor

Owen Thomas

Owen Thomas – Business Editor, San Francisco Chronicle

Owen Thomas, the business editor at the San Francisco Chronicle for the past five years, is leaving to become senior editor at tech news site Protocol.

He will remain based in San Francisco and will start his new job in March.

“I’m really excited to start out overseeing enterprise and financial services coverage at Protocol,” he wrote on Twitter.

Thomas has been a journalist for more than 25 years, moving San Francisco in 1995 to work on the website of Mother Jones magazine. Other posts have included positions at Time Inc., NBC Bay Area, VentureBeat, the Daily Dot, Business Insider and tech news site ReadWrite.

He transformed the now-defunct Valleywag from a single-writer blog into a daily must-read for the tech industry. At Business Insider, he broke the news of Microsoft’s $1.2 billion purchase of Yammer.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.