BuzzFeed News hires Ryan Mac to join growing tech team – Poynter

BuzzFeed News announced on Monday the addition of Forbes staff writer Ryan Mac to its expanding team of reporters in San Francisco who cover Silicon Valley.

Mac, who’s already based in San Francisco, joins a BuzzFeed News tech team of 20. He’ll be covering “the intersection of wealth, tech and power” under BuzzFeed San Francisco Bureau Chief Mat Honan and technology editor John Paczkowski.

Rather than focus on incremental tech coverage, Mac wants to report out big, high-impact stories, he said.

“I don’t want to be covering the next app launch off of a press release,” Mac said. “I want to be writing about how the next tech billionaire is taking down a newspaper, or an incredible lawsuit between two co-founders. That stuff takes a lot of reporting, and a lot of time to suss out.”

Ryan Mac, a staff writer at Forbes.

In a memo to his staff, Paczkowski called Mac “a scoop machine” and a “dogged reporter” with a nose for turning up great stories.

“…Whether it’s being first to report that Peter Thiel was financing Hulk Hogan’s suit against Gawker, discovering what went wrong in GoPro’s ill-fated drone program, charting the collapse of 3D Robotics, telling the real story of Silk Road and Dread Pirate Roberts, or diving deep into the tale of Minecraft’s sale to Microsoft,” Paczkowski said.

Mac begins at BuzzFeed News on June 5.

Benjamin Mullin is the managing editor of Poynter.org. He previously reported for Poynter as a staff writer, Google Journalism Fellow and Naughton Fellow, covering journalism innovation, business practices and ethics. He’s also reported for USA TODAY College and The Sacramento Bee, and he was editor in chief of The Orion, Chico State’s student-run newspaper. An Air Force brat who grew up around Northern California, he’s still adjusting to the Florida sunshine.

(via Poynter)