The Wall Street Journal is close to hiring Quartz tech and science editor Christopher Mims as its newest tech columnist, reports Kara Swisher of Re/Code.
Swisher writes, “If completed, Mims will replace its last new tech columnist Farhad Manjoo, who decamped for the New York Times in January, just a few months after arriving from Slate.
“The Journal talked to a range of writers about the high-profile slot — no, I am not going to tell you who they are, but they are easy to guess.
“As described on Quartz — the online news magazine owned by Atlantic Media — Mims is a ‘former editor at Seed, Scientific American, Technology Review, Grist and Smithsonian, and in those roles launched blogs, redesigns, video series and other half-forgotten but otherwise influential experiments in new media.’
“Mims is also one sassy dude, it seems, with a recent column titled, ‘Tech Companies Are Liars: The Samsung Edition.’
“‘Unless something is made explicit in a forum in which there are legal consequences for getting it wrong, you simply can’t trust the numbers coming out of most tech companies,’ he wrote.”
Read more here.