WSJ hires two new tech reporters

Wall Street Journal global technology editor Jonathan Krim sent out the following staff announcement on Wednesday:

I’m delighted to announce two important additions to our technology team in San Francisco:

Doug MacMillan will join us as a reporter, focusing primarily on the raft of pre-IPO consumer Internet companies that are changing much of how we do things in life, from Uber to AirbNb to Pinterest and more.

Doug comes to us from Bloomberg in San Francisco, where he spent the last four years delivering regular scoops on Yahoo, Twitter and Facebook, among others. His reporting on the high-profile IPOs of  Zynga and Groupon required those companies to add disclosures to their prospectus documents.

When he wasn’t breaking news, MacMillan wrote smart analysis and trend pieces for Businessweek, the publication he joined in 2007. For BW, he contributed to sweeping profiles of Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, and Groupon’s Andrew Mason, and spotted cultural oddities of Silicon Valley’s latest boom, such as the rise of alpha-male computer programmers he called “brogrammers.” His 2009 cover story on apps, co-written by our own Spencer Ante, coined the term “app economy” and accurately predicted the software industry’s tectonic shift toward mobile and social platforms.

MacMillan also became a driving force behind Bloomberg West, the daily TV show he appeared on regularly to discuss the day’s top stories in tech.

A native of Dayton, Ohio, and a graduate of Vanderbilt University, MacMillan began his career eight years ago in New York as an intern at Rolling Stone. To support that unpaid gig, he once in a lower east side speakeasy until getting fired for striking up a conversation with Pearl Jam front man Eddie Vedder.

Outside of work, MacMillan is a conservatory-trained percussionist who has played in settings as varied as a college rock cover band and the Greenwich Village Orchestra in New York. Before one performance of a Philip Glass timpani concerto, he made the mistake of denying entry to one very important audience member: Philip Glass. You can follow him @dmac1.

Jeff Elder also joins us as a reporter, with an investigative bent, from the San Francisco Chronicle and SFgate.com, where he currently serves as social media editor. Prior to the Chronicle, he held editing and writing positions at the Charlotte Observer, the Cleveland Plain Dealer and other news agencies. He was news editor of The European Stars & Stripes during the Balkan Wars, when the paper’s reporters helped to uncover the genocide then taking place in Bosnia. In 2004, Elder wrote a story from the National Institutes of Health breaking news on the way stress rewires the brain toward depression.

In Jeff’s own words, he also was “the world’s worst nightclub bouncer, once coming to in time to hear a cocktail waitress remark, ‘I knew he’d get decked.’  Other jobs Elder failed at in his youth include: dumptruck driver, movie theater marquee changer, lumberjack, quiche chef, pizza delivery driver and telemarketer. But while working at a bookstore he met Johnny Cash, who asked him, ‘Son, where are your books on trains?’ That made it all worthwhile.” A native of San Jose, you can follow Jeff @JeffElder.

 Please join me in welcoming Doug and Jeff.