The Verge names transportation editor, first tech editor

The Verge editor in chief Nilay Patel sent out the following announcement on Monday:

Hey everyone — as we discussed in our staff meeting, I’m excited to announce some promotions on The Verge team.

Tamara Warren will be taking on the permanent role of Transportation Editor, after ably serving as our interim editor. The way we cover the future of transportation has to be more than traditional car news and reviews, and Tamara’s already pushed us forward by finding new angles into cars like Screendrive and interesting new ways to cross transportation coverage over into our other sections. She also has an open job listing to make for a transportation reporter in San Francisco — please share it far and wide!

Natt Garun is being promoted to be our first-ever Technology Editor, working closely with Dieter, who’s building out our reviews program relaunch. It’s no small thing for The Verge to have a new person in charge of our tech news operation, but Natt’s ability to organize and direct our sprawling coverage has already paid huge dividends. The Verge’s tech coverage at its best is sharper, faster, and smarter than the competition, and Natt has lots of ideas about making it even better. We’ll be adjusting some reporting lines in the tech section to reflect this change; Natt, Dieter, and TC will be having those conversations this week.

Tasha Robinson will be our new Film & Television Editor in the culture section, reporting to Chris Plante. Tasha has already taken the lead on much of our movie and television coverage, and she’ll be focused on expanding that coverage with big Verge angles around distribution, tools, and the people who use them.

James Vincent will be our new reporter focused on AI and machine learning. James has already done tremendous work for us covering AlphaGo and other AI news — he’ll be working with all of our sections as AI comes to dominate more and more of everything we cover.

As you all already know, Helen Havlak has been promoted to be our editorial director. (I already sent a note about that, but I’m going to tweet this email, so here it is again. Please act surprised.) I cannot possibly sing Helen’s praises highly enough — so much of our recent success comes from deeply understanding our distribution channels, and Helen’s ability to use that understanding to enhance our journalism and storytelling is unparalleled

And of course, all of these new roles will build on other recent changes, like the creation of the Enterprise team under Michael Zelenko, the launch of Verge Science on Facebook under Liz Lopatto, and the further aggressive expansion of our video team under Tre Shallowhorn. We also have several open job listings across The Verge, please take a look and share them across your networks. As always, let me know if you have any questions; I’m always happy to chat.

Please join me in congratulating our colleagues — and let’s go.