At a growing media startup like Xconomy, there’s no task more thrilling than welcoming new editors and writers on board. Today is especially exciting, because I’ve got not one but two additions to tell you about.
First, I’m extremely pleased to announce that Elise Craig has joined us as the new Editor of Xconomy San Francisco, taking over that title from yours truly.
Elise’s byline will be familiar to longtime Xconomy readers. Since 2010 she’s written more than 50 informative and entertaining freelance stories for us, on subjects ranging from edtech to robotics to digital health. Now we’ve finally managed to bring her on staff, which means she’ll be able to apply her sophisticated, inquisitive eye to even more Bay Area startup stories.
A graduate of Georgetown University, Elise brings an impressive resumé to Xconomy. She worked a news producer at The Washington Post and a reporting intern at BusinessWeek before entering the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, where she reported for OaklandNorth.net and earned her Master’s degree in 2010. Since then she’s worked as a researcher/reporter at consumer protection site Fairwarning.org; as a research editor at Wired Magazine; as a freelance writer and editor at Wired, Healthy California, California Lawyer, and Xconomy; and as a researcher for Grantland.
As the editor of most of Elise’s freelance stories, I’ve come to admire and trust her instinct for storytelling, her ability to zero in on the telling details, and her absolute commitment to accuracy. From now on our coverage of the Bay Area innovation scene will be in her capable hands, with an emphasis all things infotech-related.
On the biotech side, I have another huge coup to announce. We’ve hired Alex Lash, a longtime biotech reporter based in San Francisco, as Xconomy’s new National Life Sciences Editor. Biotech industry insiders know Alex as the former biopharma editor of Start-Up, part of a prestigious family of publications at Elsevier that also includes The Pink Sheet and In Vivo.
Alex’s history covering the high-tech world dates back to the first dot-com boom, when he wrote for CNET’s News.com and The Industry Standard, covering subjects such as the Netscape-Microsoft browser wars and the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft. He has also written for a variety of publications such as Wired, Business 2.0, Popular Science, SF Weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Chow, and Architecture.
From his time at Elsevier, and before that, covering biopharma at financial magazine The Deal, Alex brings deep experience writing about biotech giants like Biogen Idec and Celgene, as well as the evolution of venture investing in the life sciences and technologies from gene editing to new Alzheimer’s medicines. While he lives in San Francisco, Alex will lead our life sciences and healthcare coverage across our nine-city network, with lots of help from our excellent deputy national life sciences editor, Ben Fidler.
As for me? I’m taking on a brand-new title at Xconomy, Editor at Large. I’ll still write frequently about companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I’ll continue to oversee Xperience, our consumer site. But I’ll now have more freedom to write long-form stories about important examples of high-tech entrepreneurship and innovation across our whole network, and sometimes even outside of it.
A note to PR professionals: If you ever pitched me about San Francisco stories, you can now pitch Elise instead, at [email protected]. If you ever worked with Luke Timmerman on life sciences stories, you can now reach out to Alex instead, at [email protected].
Overnight, we’ve tripled our strength here in the San Francisco bureau, and I couldn’t be more excited. I hope you’ll follow Elise and Alex here (and on Twitter at @e_craigxsf and @alexlash) and help us welcome both of them to the family of Xconomy writers and readers.
