Washington Post hires WSJ’s Dwoskin to cover Silicon Valley

Washington Post economy and business editor Greg Schneider and deputy business editor David Cho sent out the following staff announcement on Wednesday:

We’re thrilled to announce that Elizabeth Dwoskin will be joining Financial as our Silicon Valley correspondent, writing about the companies, people, trends and ideas that shape the technology industry. Lizza comes to us from The Wall Street Journal, where she has been covering Big Data out of San Francisco.

Lizza’s background makes her uniquely qualified to take on a posting like Silicon Valley. She got her undergraduate degree in sociocultural anthropology from Columbia University, and then earned her master’s at the Columbia J-school, where she won awards for both national and local reporting.

She worked at the Village Voice, where she investigated slumlords and wrote about a female Citibank employee who was fired for being “too hot;” contributed columns to the New York Times, including a memorable piece on “The Worst Bathroom in New York;” wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek, where her former editor described her as the most ferocious reporter he ever met; and joined the Journal 2 ½ years ago to write about the algorithms and privacy issues that shape many of our daily interactions with tech.

At the Journal, Lizza’s stories are revelatory and insightful. She wrote about a company that puts sensors in neighborhood businesses so the merchants can learn where their cellphone-carrying customers shop without ever asking them; how programmers’ biases can creep into software; and what it could mean for consumers if Google and Microsoft stop enabling advertising companies to track cookies in browsers.

Lizza is a rare writer who has an eye for people stories but an instinct for the corporate bottom line. She is always thinking two steps ahead, coming up with conceptual scoops such as the rise of emotion-mining and the way the most promising science students are abandoning research to help crunch consumer data. Please join us in welcoming Lizza when she starts on March 21.