WIRED adds senior reviews editor —Julian Chokkattu (@JulianChokkattu) has joined WIRED as senior associate editor of reviews, covering new product reviews of consumer electronics. He was formerly with Digital Trends, where he served as mobile and wearables editor.
Fretty joins Industry Week — Peter Fretty (@pfretty) has been named managing editor of Industry Week. He covers advances in manufacturing, information technology and software.
Shifting roles at Business Insider — Meghan Morris (@MeghanEMorris), senior reporter at Business Insider, has shifted her coverage to report on tech deals and WeWork. She writes about the latest deals and IPOs, and works on longer enterprise pieces on culture, corporate scandals and financial issues within tech companies. Morris has been on staff since 2018 and most recently covered the asset management industry.
Marron leaves MZA to join vendor — Chris Marron (@Chris_MarronMZA) has left his role at MZA Consultants, where he covered the contact center and customer experience, to join 8×8 as director of competitive and market intelligence.
Facebook Launches Facebook News — Facebook last week launched a news section—Facebook News—a dedicated place for curated news on Facebook.
According to its blog, Facebook News will feature a wide range of content across four categories of publishers: general, topical, diverse and local news. The company said it surveyed over 100,000 US-based Facebook users at the beginning of the year about what topics they were most interested in. It found it was under-serving many subjects people wanted most in their news feeds, especially around categories like entertainment, health, business and sports.
During the initial test, Facebook News said it will showcase local, original reporting by surfacing local publications from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth, Philadelphia, Houston, Washington DC, Miami, Atlanta and Boston. In the coming months, it will include local news from Today In, its local news and community information tab, which recently expanded to more than 6,000 US towns and cities.
Facebook News offers several key features, including:
- Today’s Stories chosen by a team of journalists and updated throughout the day
- Personalization based on the news users read, share and follow
- Topic sections to dive deeper into business, entertainment, health, science & tech, and sports
- Your Subscriptions, a section for people who have linked their paid news subscriptions to their Facebook account
- Controls to hide articles, topics and publishers that users don’t want to see