Blog portfolio update: Welcome Rachel King, many others
As you may have noticed by the mug shots hopping around the site, Rachel King has moved over to Between the Lines. She will be joining ZDNet as a staff writer later this month and then become our San Francisco reporter in June.
With the move, we've also promoted Andrew Nusca as an editor at ZDNet. Andrew's role for the last few years has been split between ZDNet, SmartPlanet and product tasks. For instance, he recently wrote the 60 page spec for the SmartPlanet redesign. It's safe to say he can do long-form writing if called upon.
In upcoming weeks, Andrew will be focused on the editorial side of the house and will be contributing to Between the Lines and continue on SmartPlanet. We figured we'd have Andrew pick a side before his head exploded. We plan to hop around to cover multiple topics as usual since that's the best way to connect the tech dots.
What happened to Sam Diaz? Sam started his own freelance and media consulting business. He is also still around the network on Googling Google, where we'll be doing tag-team coverage on Google I/O next week.
The second best part of my job---behind writing---is being a talent portfolio manager.
With that said, we've also made a few other changes. As noted a few days ago, Ricardo Bilton and Gloria Sin have taken over the Toybox blog, formerly Rachel and Andrew's jumping off point. Ricardo comes to us from the International Business Times and the New York Observer; Gloria arrives from Fast Company magazine and NYConvergence.com. Both are based in New York.
Meanwhile, we spun off Violet Blue to her own blog. She was a contributor at Tech Broiler. With Pulp Tech, Violet will have the latitude to cover tech via her unique prism. Violet's look at digital death is a must read.
Among other moves since my last network update:
- Denise Amrich has joined ZDNet to restart our healthcare IT coverage. Amrich is a nurse so she sees a lot of tablets, electronic medical records and other tools up close.
- Emil Protalinski is covering Facebook on the Friending Facebook blog.
- Peter Cohen, a long-time Apple follower, has been added to our Gamification blog.
- James Kendrick joined ZDNet a few months ago to bring his expertise to the table at Mobile News. James brings a lot of history and context to the mobile game.
- In addition, Ken Hess, a data center and virtualization veteran, will be joining Dan Kusnetzky and Paula Rooney on the Virtually Speaking blog.
As noted in my previous quarterly update, we're looking to fill a few key areas. We're looking for:
- Another security blogger.
- iOS and Android mobile development experts---this blog is likely to be a two-headed effort.
- Talented writers in India and Brazil.
- And various talented tech writers that can entertain, inform and make you go hmm every once in a while.