Joseph Menn, a well-known technology reporter for the Los Angeles Times, has left the paper for a job at the Financial Times in San Francisco.
Menn will start his new job on March 16, he tells Talking Biz News. He has currently been on a book leave.
He has won several national and state awards for his journalism, including a Best in Business Award from The Society of American Business Editors and Writers, and has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His reporting and writing has been nominated twice for a Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious in business journalism. He is a co-author of the book The People vs. Big Tobacco and the sole author of a book on Napster.
In a self-deprecating note to his co-workers at the Times, Menn wrote, “Menn’s meteoric arc at the distinguished paper saw him rise from his first posting as a technology business staff writer in San Francisco all the way to his final position as a technology business staff writer in Los Angeles.
“Menn said he was leaving of his own volition to take a job covering tech for the London-based Financial Times back in San Francisco, where freaks feel more welcome.
“In a rambling interview, he sought to portray the patently lateral move as an act of courage and faith in an obviously doomed medium. Knowledgeable observers, however, said it exemplified the appalling lack of imagination typical of that afflicting newspapers as a whole.
“At the Times, Menn said he was most proud of reporting in 2000 that destroyed the pioneering Web company and pederasty front Digital Entertainment Network, as well as his searingly competent work on computer security, Microsoft, and the Hollywood writers’ strike.”
