WSJ/Dow Jones names deputy tech editor

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

I’m delighted to announce that Geoffrey A. Fowler has been promoted to a Deputy Technology Editor position at The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones.

In this new slot, Geoff will take on a player-coach role in our expanding global technology team.

On one hand, he will lead a small set of tech reporters to create journalism that is real-time and digitally savvy, as well as in-depth and memorable.

But Geoff also will continue to write broadly on technology and Silicon Valley, especially about the intersection of tech and human lives. Geoff will remain a critical player in our coverage of the social, political and economic implications of our digitally connected world, from education to privacy to social activism. He will also help track new device technologies working their way into every niche of our lives, such as the recent growth in wearable, drivable and flyable computers.

Geoff and this job are a perfect match. He honed his role as our resident anthropologist over a dozen years at the Journal. He joined us as an intern in 2001 after graduating from Harvard College and a master’s program in social anthropology at Cambridge University. Geoff wrote his first page-one story about the travails of typing with thumbs, his first of 49 A-heds.

He spent seven years as a correspondent in Asia, where he covered the Asian media and marketing industry, Chinese consumers, SARS and earthquakes, along with the rise of the world’s largest Internet market. Geoff moved to the San Francisco bureau in 2009, where he’s written about many of the most influential tech companies, including Amazon, eBay, Facebook and Apple.

Most recently, he has ably stepped into full-time editing during the bureau’s transition.

Finally, Geoff has been part of the Journal team that covered the Olympics in Beijing, Vancouver and London, and we expect him to continue in that role in the future.