FORTUNE Announces Several New Editorial Hires
Rachel Schallom, Maria Aspan, Bernhard Warner, David Meyer, Karen Yuan, and more join Fortune's global staff.
FORTUNE editor-in-chief Clifton Leaf sent the following note to FORTUNE staff on Monday:
Dear colleagues,
It gives me great pleasure to welcome several new writers and editors to FORTUNE and to announce one well-deserved promotion.
Rachel Schallom joins FORTUNE as deputy digital editor, based in the New York office. Rachel, who until recently was managing editor at VICE, helped lead a 70-person newsroom there and has demonstrated a talent for managing teams, developing and refining content strategies, and growing audiences. Prior to joining VICE, she was newsroom project manager at the Wall Street Journal, and worked at Fusion, the Sun Sentinel, the Los Angeles Times, and the Huntsville Times. A one-time adjunct professor at the University of Miami, who importantly taught coding to journalism students, Rachel continues to curate a popular bimonthly newsletter highlighting developments in digital journalism. She’s also a member of the ONA-Poynter Leadership Academy for Women in Digital Media (class of 2016) and Digital Women Leaders, an initiative that provides free coaching for women in journalism. A native of St. Louis, Rachel earned both a bachelor’s and a master’s degree from the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Maria Aspan has joined us a senior writer, covering finance as well as the intersection of business and government policy. She comes to FORTUNE from Inc., where she was an editor-at-large, writing features about startups, finance, technology, gender, and international business, while also overseeing Inc.’s financial coverage and its annual Female Founders 100 list. Her feature stories have won multiple SABEW honors, and in February, HarperCollins published her first book: Startup Money Made Easy: The Inc. Guide to Every Financial Question About Starting, Running, and Growing Your Business. Maria has also covered business and finance for the New York Times, Thomson Reuters, and American Banker, where she served as national editor and covered the financial crisis and its aftermath. She is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Sciences Po in Paris, and will work out of FORTUNE’s New York office.
Bernhard Warner expands our European ranks as a senior writer/editor for global finance and investing. Currently based in Rome, he writes and edits stories about the business of banking and finance in EMEA, as well as the gyrations of the markets there. For several years Bernhard served as a Reuters correspondent covering the Internet, technology, and media industries, and he has written for the Guardian’s Long Read, Reuters, the Atlantic, Slate.com’s The Big Money, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Wired, and Inc.—to name a few—writing about everything from bond issuances to bus bombings to the hacking of the Papal conclave. He has also co-produced two short, award-winning documentary films—one of which, “Maisha,” about child miners in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, was screened at the United Nations. Earlier in his career, he chronicled the rise and fall of the first dotcom boom for Adweek and The Industry Standard—before moving to Europe in 2000 for a two-year reporting assignment that, it seems, keeps getting extended.
David Meyer joined the FORTUNE family this past June as a senior writer, based in Berlin. For the past decade and a half he has worked in Europe, covering technology, regulatory policy, and business for Politico Europe, Gigaom, and other media outlets, where he held senior roles. He has also written for the BBC, the Guardian, the International Association of Privacy Professionals, and he is the author of the digital rights primer, Control Shift: How Technology Affects You and Your Rights. Hailing originally from South Africa, David earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Cape Town, but he has been in Europe ever since—earning a Master’s degree in multimedia journalism at Bournemouth University in the UK before covering the mobile revolution, communications technology, and other news for ZDNet UK. One of his star achievements there was exposing the true costs of mobile data roaming—something we can all relate to, no doubt.
Karen Yuan becomes FORTUNE’s newsletter editor, responsible for overseeing our prodigious—and growing—collection of daily and weekly feeds. Karen was previously an assistant editor at the Atlantic, where she co-launched and edited its premium newsletter. She also wrote stories about the commercialization of Instagram poetry and the impact of a million-member Facebook group on the Asian diaspora, the latter of which was recognized by Princeton’s Asian American Studies department for its academic dexterity. While on CNN’s social desk, she was one of the first journalists to write stories through innovative formats such as Twitter Moments and news bots. Karen graduated from Columbia University, where she orchestrated a rare campus visit from Snap cofounder and CEO Evan Spiegel, interviewing him in front of hundreds of Snapchatting classmates. She’ll work out of our New York office.
Emily Savage is FORTUNE’s new social media editor. She showcases and highlights stories across FORTUNE’s social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, strategizing social content packaging based on performance and data. She previously was an associate editor of audience development at the Pacific Standard. She has also worked as a music editor, staff writer, and social media strategist for publications including the San Francisco Bay Guardian and J. the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California. Her work has appeared in SF Weekly, Bust Magazine, Edible Ojai, and more.
Nicole Goodkind joins FORTUNE’s New York-based staff as a writer covering government, politics, and business. Since the fall of 2017, Nicole has been a senior politics reporter at Newsweek, focusing on that same busy intersection between politics, policy, and business. Before that, she worked as a reporter and video producer for Yahoo Finance for nearly five years, writing on a broad range of economics and other topics, including fiscal and monetary policy. Previously, Nicole, a native New Yorker, who studied both international relations and film at Cornell, wrote about music and culture for Paper Magazine, “The Today Show,” and Fuse TV.
Though he joined FORTUNE at the beginning of the year, I have been remiss in giving an official welcome to writer Eamon Barrett, who surely merits one now. Eamon has been a tremendous and tireless asset on Clay Chandler’s team in Hong Kong, where he covers business and tech in China and in Asia at large, and who edits the Sino-Saturday edition of FORTUNE’s CEO Daily and The Loop, our brand new weekly newsletter on sustainability and the environment. He writes frequently about how FORTUNE 500 firms tackle environmental issues, and about the ways in which leading firms have embraced design and design thinking in formulating corporate strategy. Eamon also assists with programming for our Asia-based conferences, including Brainstorm Design, the FORTUNE Global Technology Forum, and the FORTUNE Global Sustainability Forum. He earned dual honors degrees in Chinese and International Relations with a distinction in Mandarin from the University of Leeds, and has a diploma in art, design and media. A perfect combo, it would seem, for Eamon’s sprawling role.
As with Eamon, Lance Lambert is already a familiar presence to those in the New York office. Earlier in the summer, he joined us as an associate data editor on Scott DeCarlo’s team, where he’s in the throes of launching our new data-driven premium newsletter. Previously, he worked as a data journalist at realtor.com where he analyzed millions of proprietary housing transactions and produced attention-getting stories. Before that he was a data journalist at Bloomberg, managing the Best Business School rankings, and worked as a database reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education in Washington D.C. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati and an Ohio native, Lambert is a long-time aficionado of SQL and R—data people will understand those references—and he’s more than happy to answer newsroom data questions or pair up on ambitious reporting projects.
Naomi Xu Elegant has become a new staff writer for FORTUNE, based in Hong Kong, where she is tasked with reporting on business and tech in China and in Asia at large, as well as helping edit the Sino-Saturday edition of FORTUNE’s CEO Daily newsletter. Prior to joining us, Naomi covered the public school system in Philadelphia and interned at CNBC’s Beijing bureau. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, Naomi grew up in Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and is a fluent Mandarin speaker.
Grady McGregor is also a new writer for FORTUNE, currently based in Hong Kong. He will cover business, tech, and all things China-related. Shortly after graduating with honors from Connecticut’s Wesleyan University, the Minnesota native (who partly grew up in Beijing) decamped for the oil-rich Bakken region of North Dakota, where he briefly covered political and other news for the Dickinson Press—before moving to Amman, Jordan, to learn Arabic and freelance for local outlets. Most recently, he was an editor with Synaps, a qualitative research agency based in Beirut. In addition to speaking Arabic and English, Grady is a fluent Mandarin speaker.
As with Eamon and Lance, writer Anne Sraders is already ensconced at FORTUNE, where she won a seat on Lee Clifford’s finance and investing desk after wowing the editors during her brief internship at FORTUNE. Prior to joining us in the New York office, Anne worked at TheStreet.com, writing on a variety of topics from fintech to investing. A native of northern Virginia, Anne attended The King’s College, where she studied media and journalism and served as a managing editor for her college paper. And judging by her work at FORTUNE so far, it’s no wonder she took home the “Best NextGen Reporting Award” at the New York State Society of CPAs’ 2019 Excellence in Financial Journalism Awards.
Finally, and at the risk of burying the lede, I am incredibly pleased to announce one very well deserved promotion: Claire Zillman becomes a senior editor at FORTUNE, effective immediately. Since relocating to FORTUNE’s London office in 2016, Claire has overseen our team of writers in Europe, assigning and editing stories from staff writers and contributors alike. She has served as co-author of The Broadsheet, and co-chaired both the MPW International Summit in London and MPW NextGen. On top of that, Claire has been a steady hand on conference coverage, orchestrating the reporting from our latest summit in Yunnan, China, as well as from Davos, Switzerland, year after year. And as Claire’s latest feature story in the October print issue makes abundantly clear—please read “The Last Boys’ Club” if you haven’t yet—she is both a thorough reporter and an elegant storyteller.
Please join me in congratulating Claire and welcoming our many new colleagues.
CL