Xconomy’s New York Team Doubles in Size, Plots East Coast (Biotech) Takeover

It’s easy to forget that Arlene Weintraub, Xconomy New York’s editor, has been running a one-woman show since joining us in April. Sure she’s had loads of help from her colleagues across the Xconomy network. But still, the whole of New York tech and life sciences is a big monster of a beat for one on-the-ground reporter to tackle—and she’s been making it look easy.

So easy, in fact, that we’ve decided to load a little more on her plate. Effective, well, weeks ago, Arlene is adding “East Coast biotechnology editor” to her list of roles at Xconomy, which means you’ll be seeing her byline more on Xconomy Boston (and seeing her face more on the New York-Boston BoltBus, if that’s the way you roll).

Arlene will be working closely with our national biotech editor, Luke Timmerman, and we’re thrilled that between them we have two of the country’s best life sciences reporters helping us cover the industry across the map. But we have big ambitions for our coverage of tech in the Big Apple too, so we’ve brought in a veteran tech reporter to help Arlene out on that front, João-Pierre S. Ruth.

João-Pierre is a veteran of NJBIZ and blogs on his own site, OpenBandwidth.com. Careful observers of Xconomy will also note that he’s our third writer to go by the name JP, following Juha-Pekka Tikka and Jukka Perttu, journalists from Finland who did fellowships with us in 2009 and 2010, respectively. But, to blatantly steal a line from my colleague Greg, the new JP’s not Finnish, he’s just getting started. So if you’ve got New York tech news to share, feel free to ping him at [email protected], and if you’ve got Boston life sciences news—or pretty much anything related to New York—Arlene’s got you covered at [email protected]. And if you have a tip of cross-country proportions, you can always reach the whole editorial team at [email protected].

Author: Rebecca Zacks

Rebecca is Xconomy's co-founder. She was previously the managing editor of Physician's First Watch, a daily e-newsletter from the publishers of New England Journal of Medicine. Before helping launch First Watch, she spent a decade covering innovation for Technology Review, Scientific American, and Discover Magazine's TV show. In 2005-2006 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT. Rebecca holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Brown University and a master's in science journalism from Boston University.