Vauhini Vara leaving Wall Street Journal

Vauhini Vara, a California-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal, is leaving the business newspaper on Friday.

Vara covers California politics for The Journal. But in her farewell email to her colleagues on Thursday, she noted that her last week at the paper was spent covering other stories.

“I’ve had the great honor of spending my last week at the Journal taking advantage of the two best things about this place,” said Vara. “Helping to cover the Asiana crash let me work one last time with a team of Journal reporters who are stunningly brilliant, ethical, collegial and hardworking. And writing the last ahed of my Journal career gave me an excuse to participate a final time in the journalism world’s highest art form.”

The A-hed story was about a controversy in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco about a bacon restaurant.

Previously, she spent four years as a technology reporter for the Journal in San Francisco and for WSJ.com in New York, first covering Oracle and other software companies and later inaugurating the Journal’s Facebook beat.

She has been a guest on CNN, CNBC and NPR, and her journalism has also appeared in the Seattle Times and the Denver Post.

She earned a master’s degree from the University of Iowa, where she studied fiction at the Writers’ Workshop. Her short stories have been published or are forthcoming in Tin House, Glimmer Train, Black Warrior Review and Epoch.

“It’s tough to leave this peerless institution full of incredible people,” she wrote in her goodbye email.