WSJ reporter MacMillan to cover tech policy and economics

Douglas MacMillan

Wall Street Journal reporter Douglas MacMillan, who has been covering startups and venture capital, has a new beat.

MacMillan will now cover tech policy and economics, exploring how tech companies acquire power and use it to shape people’s lives.

He joined the Journal in October 2013 from Bloomberg News, where he also wrote analysis and trend pieces for Businessweek, the publication he joined in 2007.

For BW, he wrote profiles of Mark Zuckerberg, Marissa Mayer, and Groupon’s Andrew Mason, and spotted cultural oddities of Silicon Valley such as the rise of alpha-male computer programmers he called “brogrammers.”

His 2009 cover story on apps, co-written with Spencer Ante, coined the term “app economy” and accurately predicted the software industry’s tectonic shift toward mobile and social platforms.

A native of Dayton, Ohio, and a graduate of Vanderbilt University, MacMillan began his career in New York as an intern at Rolling Stone.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.