WSJ tech reporter to join NY Times biz news desk

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

New York Times business editor Larry Ingrassia and tech editor Damon Darlin made the following announcement to the staff on Monday:

We are pleased to announced that Nick Wingfield, a technology reporter for the Wall Street Journal, is joining the technology team in BizDay.

Nick has been a strong competitor and we are very happy to have him on our side to chronicle the many changes in the technology industry and how it affects our lives.

Nick, a native of San Francisco, started his journalism career in at technology trade publications in the San Francisco Bay Area in the early 1990s, one of which was a magazine devoted entirely to Apple’s first foray into tablet computing, the Newton. Both efforts – the magazine and the Newton – perished. In 1996, he observed the dot-com boom up close as one of the first reporters hired at CNet where he wrote about the now nearly forgotten Web wars between Microsoft and Netscape.

He was quickly snapped up by the Wall Street Journal’s fledgling Web effort, then called the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, where he worked for two years in San Francisco before moving to New York in 1999 to join the WSJ’s print edition as a technology reporter. He moved back to the Journal’s San Francisco bureau in 2000 as a technology reporter where he wrote about the dot com bust–the vulture investors picking over the carcasses of dead dot-coms, disappearing eBay scam artists and the cops who hunt them.

Since 2005, he’s been based in Seattle in a one-man satellite bureau to San Francisco, where he has written aheds on everything from Steve Jobs’ hostility to buttons to a group of performance artists in Seattle who ran afoul of state laws by staging fake wrestling matches. He contributed to the Wall Street Journal’s “What They Know” privacy series, which was a finalist for the Loeb awards in two categories, with an inside look at the decisions Microsoft made to prevent privacy protections.

Nick, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, is married to a psychiatrist. Along with their two children, ages four and eight, they are restoring an 86-year-old house in Seattle, where he will continue to work for the foreseeable future.