Meet the Staff

Lauren Brown (@laurenalixb) is the deputy ideas editor for Quartz. Most recently, she was the Contributors Editor at Business Insider where she oversaw all contributors and syndication partnerships and was responsible for an overhaul of the entire program. Lauren received her master’s from Columbia’s School of Journalism where she specialized in digital media. She also worked for WorldNow, Wiley and was a contributing writer for Movmnt Magazine. She received her undergraduate degree from Cornell University where she majored in English and History.

A. Craig Copetas (@acraiginparis) is Quartz’s Paris-based correspondent-at-large. He spent 10 years as a staff reporter of The Wall Journal in Paris and a decade as an award-winning senior writer at Bloomberg News. Copetas began his career in the early 1970s at the London bureau of Rolling Stone magazine, going on to become an associate editor at Esquire magazine and, over the ensuing years, a foreign correspondent stationed in Latin America, the Middle East, Russia and China for the New York Daily News, Village Voice, Soho Weekly News and Regardie’s magazine. A former visiting scholar at The Harriman Institute of Advanced Russian Study at Columbia University in New York and a current associate professor of narrative journalism at the American University of Paris, his books include Metal Men (the story of rogue oil and commodity trader Marc Rich); Bear Hunting with the Politburo and, most recently, Mona Lisa’s Pajamas – Diverting Dispatches From a Roving Reporter. The French Ministry of Culture has decorated Copetas a chevalier in the Order of Arts and Letters and he now appears every Friday night on the globally broadcast France 24 current events television program The World This Week, which can also be viewed in dedicated English, French and Arabic at http://www.france24.com.

Gina Chon (@GinaChon) covers the corporate world for Quartz, meaning M&A, IPOs, board/executive moves, trends, analysis, profiles – in other words, everything under the sun. She was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal for seven years, most recently covering M&A. That was a logical step considering prior to that, she was the Iraq Correspondent for the Journal for two years and then covered the Haiti earthquake upon her return from Baghdad. She also lived in South Korea and Cambodia, and has reported from Myanmar, Thailand, the UAE and other countries. She co-wrote a book based on more than 1,000 hours of interviews with the top surviving Khmer Rouge leader, Behind the Killing Fields.

David Cullen (@davidfcullen) is a web application engineer at Quartz.  His focus is on improving the usability and fluidity of the site while evolving and expanding the functionality and user experience.  David joined Quartz after working in a range of technical roles, from VOIP engineer to systems administrator and most recently as a Javascript developer at digital agency Lightmaker.  Always interested in the open source community, he is continuously working to make Quartz more open and accessible.

Kevin J. Delaney (@kevinjdelaney) is editor in chief and co-founder of Quartz. He was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal for a decade, with that time split between hardship postings in Paris and San Francisco. While covering Internet companies such as Google, Twitter, and Facebook for the Journal, he became convinced that newspapers could do much more to ensure that good journalism thrives in the digital age. He returned to New York and became managing editor of WSJ.com, where he led efforts that helped greatly expand the Journal’s online readership and championed innovative journalism projects that went on to win prizes. Early in his career, Kevin was a reporter for SmartMoney Magazine and a TV producer in Montreal.

Michael Donohoe (@donohoe) is the Product Engineering Director for Quartz. His focus is the continuous development and iteration of the site – with a emphasis on clarity, and re-thinking the traditional way people digest the news. He worked at The New York Times from 2003 to May 2011. When he first started, tables where considered the standard for web site layout and IE6 was cutting edge. He worked on a number of section and product launches, re-designs, and re-launches. He served various roles, ultimately rising to that of Senior Product Engineer. Michael was a contributor to the NYT’s TimesOpen blog, developer initiatives, and Hack Days. In his spare time he builds things that bear a close resemblance to work projects. He is fluent in English and speaks broken Irish.

Tim Fernholz (@timfernholz) covers state, business and society for Quartz. What does that mean? Whenever business competition spills into the halls of government, economic conflict puts protesters in the street, companies disrupt the way we live or public policy shapes the market, he’ll be there. Probably with statistics, anecdotes and a lot of nuance. Tim began covering politics and policy in Washington, D.C. at the American Prospect in the uneventful year of 2008, before joining National Journal in 2011 to write about fiscal policy. Then he was the business editor of GOOD Magazine, leading coverage on everything from tech companies and trade wars to globalization and political economy. He has been a fellow at the New America Foundation studying financial regulation and was awarded a Knight Journalism Fellowship in foreign affairs coverage and new media. He lives in Los Angeles, California, where he is outdoors as often as possible and maintains exhausting opinions about tacos. He is from the Great State of New Hampshire.

Simone Foxman (@simonefoxman) is a reporter at Quartz, focusing on finance and corporations. She began covering financial markets at Business Insider, tackling the European sovereign debt and banking crises, the LIBOR scandal, and all things Federal Reserve. Simone first fell in love with economics in high school, when she took a class in the subject to fill a free block in her schedule. She just couldn’t stay away from the subject, and studied economics and Middle Eastern studies at Columbia University.

Gwynn Guilford (@sinoceros) is a general reporter and editor for Quartz. She recently wrapped up a stint at Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, where she helped round out the blog’s coverage of China and economics. She returned to the US in late 2011 after six years in China, where she researched Chinese companies and macroeconomic developments for hedge funds. Prior to that, she covered China’s venture capital scene, its art market, intellectual property and similar topics for a national business journal. Gwynn has also worked in Myanmar, reporting for the Myanmar Times & Business Review. Her work has appeared in Slate, the Christian Science Monitor and the Far Eastern Economic Review. Gwynn speaks and reads Mandarin, as well as basic Burmese.

Josh Kadis is a web applications technologist for Quartz, building features for the publishing interface, API, user accounts, and the front-end web app. He joined Quartz to focus on long-term product development and user experience after a year at digital creative agency Big Spaceship, where he worked on HP and other clients. He is a graduate of the University of Colorado’s Boulder Digital Works program and previously worked as a writer, strategist, and developer in the bicycle industry.

S. Mitra Kalita (@mitrakalita) is the ideas editor at Quartz. She worked previously at The Wall Street Journal, where she oversaw coverage of the Great Recession, launched a local news section for New York City and, most recently, reported on the housing crisis. She also launched Mint, a business paper in New Delhi, and has previously worked for the Washington Post, Newsday and the Associated Press. She is the author of three books related to migration and globalization, and speaks seven languages (but only four of them well). She is an adjunct professor of journalism at St. John’s and Columbia universities, and previously served as president of the South Asian Journalists Association. Born in Brooklyn, Mitra was raised in Long Island, Puerto Rico and New Jersey—with regular trips to her grandparents’ villages in Assam, India. She lives (and eats) in the Jackson Heights neighborhood of New York City, along with her artist husband and two daughters.

Ritchie S. King (@ritchiesking) is a reporter and visual storyteller at Quartz, focusing on infographics and interactive features. In a previous life, he was a chemical engineer at a startup that was trying to turn things like wood chips and switchgrass into fuel. Though he left the world of engineering to become a journalist, he’s still into math and likes to muck with data. While he was a graduate student at NYU’s Science, Health, and Environmental Reporting Program, he interned at the science desk at The New York Times. After graduating, he moved to the other side of the building to train with the pros at the graphics desk. Before joining Quartz, he spent a few months working with the intensely creative art team at Bloomberg Businessweek.

Lily Kuo (@lilkuo) is a reporter at Quartz covering emerging markets. She most recently reported for Reuters where she got a crash course in financial journalism and went on to cover general news, reporting on anything from protests and shootings to municipal bankruptcy and cyber security. Before that she lived in Taiwan and China re-learning Chinese and pretending to discover her ancestral roots. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong and the China Post in Taiwan. She holds a dual master’s degree in international affairs from Peking University and the London School of Economics. She graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with bachelor’s degrees in English and Spanish literature, and creative writing. Her obsessions include but are not limited to Chinese investment and diplomacy in Africa, Southeast Asia and Latin America; the expanding middle class of emerging economies, and post-Arab Spring economic transition in the Middle East and North Africa.

Jay Lauf is Quartz’s Publisher. He studied English, European History and Law in both the US and at Durham University in the U.K. with an eye toward beginning a full-time professional career in journalism.  After a year covering the Anti-Defamation League, Israeli politics and culture for The Jewish Monthly in Washington, D.C., he moved to the other side of the masthead launching a 24-year career in publishing.  Involved in start-ups, web launches and the expansion of events and conventions across his years in trade magazines, he also helped launch the U.S. edition of T3 (Tomorrow’s Technology Today). He then moved to WIRED magazine in 2001 serving there seven years, the last two as Publisher.  He joined The Atlantic as VP/Publisher in April 2008, and since coming onboard, he and his team have increased digital ad revenue 438%.  Jay’s “obsession” is figuring out how to make high quality, high integrity journalism commercially viable for the long term.

Sara Lerner (@saralerner) is Quartz’s Associate General Manager. She graduated from USC’s Annenberg School of Journalism with degrees in Print Journalism, Philosophy and Italian, before withstanding a brief stint in fashion reporting for WWD in Los Angeles and fashion branding in Milan, Italy. After moving to New York, she became the managing editor of Thrillist.com, overseeing the daily production of 17 different editions. Intrigued by the challenge of building beautiful things that live online, she worked for two years as a content strategist for digital creative agency Big Spaceship, creating award-winning websites, installations, and mobile applications for clients such as Google, GE, Gilt Groupe, and AOL. Sara is most obsessed with the intersection of things—the point where business models, creative teams, words, design, the internet, non-internet, and rest of it all meet.

Steve LeVine (@stevelevine), Quartz’s Washington correspondent, writes about the intersection of energy, technology and geopolitics, a juncture of some of the most important and quickly developing events and trends on the planet. LeVine teaches the subject as an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program in the Graduate School of Foreign Service. He is a Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. LeVine comes to the beat after 18 years as a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union, Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Philippines, where he wrote for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and Newsweek. Most recently, LeVine founded and ran The Oil and the Glory, a blog on energy and geopolitics at Foreign Policy magazine. He is the author of two books: The Oil and the Glory, a history of oil told through the 1990s-2000s oil rush on the Caspian Sea; and  Putin’s Labyrinth, a profile of Russia through the lives and deaths of six Russians.

Gideon Lichfield (@glichfield) is the editor in charge of news at Quartz. He joined after a 16-year career at The Economist, which took him from the science desk in his native London to postings in Mexico City, Moscow, and Jerusalem, covering uprisings, wars, trade disputes, business feuds, political rivalries, social protests, philosophical arguments and bar-room brawls. In 2009 he moved to New York City, where his work on various digital projects for The Economist and teaching budding journalists at NYU set him to thinking about the future of the profession. The main thing he remembers from all his travels are the languages, of which he knows five well enough for interviewing evasive politicians, two more well enough to read, and one just well enough to haggle in. He is obsessed with finding better ways to do the kind of journalism that makes sense of the world instead of just keeping up with it, and with answering the question that has haunted his career: Why can’t they all just get along?

Christopher Mims (@mims) is the science and technology correspondent for Quartz. He believes that the most interesting things about the universe have yet to be discovered, and that technology is the primary driver of cultural change. He is often surprised and delighted by what people will say on record. He is a former editor at Seed, Scientific American, Technology Review, Grist and Smithsonian, and in those roles launched blogs, redesigns, video series and other half-forgotten but otherwise influential experiments in new media. As a freelancer with the news metabolism of a hummingbird, he spent a decade writing news and analysis for the aforementioned, as well as BBC, Wired, Nature and the like. His Japanese is mostly regional slang, and sounds funny to people from Tokyo. He had a brief but varied stint in a neuroscience lab, during which he came to appreciate that research is hard, and all results are preliminary until other scientists have reproduced them — and sometimes not even then.

Leo Mirani (@lmirani) is a journalist and editor based in Mumbai, India. He has worked at The Economist, Time Out Mumbai and Tehelka. His writing has appeared in The Independent, The Sunday Telegraph, The Guardian, AFP and Elle India and he has earned datelines from places as far afield as Moscow, Nairobi and Valletta. His reporting interests include technology, data policy, media, South Asia and the European project. He likes lists.

Adam Pasick (@adampasick) is Quartz’s Senior Asia Correspondent. Adam was the former managing editor of nymag.com. Before that he spent 10 years with Reuters in New York, London, and—in a career move that will haunt him for all eternity—the virtual world of Second Life. He is based in Bangkok, Thailand, where it is probably really hot right now.

Matt Phillips (@matthewphillips) writes about finance, markets and economics. He worked at The Wall Street Journal for seven years, most recently covering the aftermath of the Great Recession and the relentless descent of U.S. interest rates. Other descents he covered at the Journal include the January 2009 splashdown of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River and Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2008. Matt caught the markets bug as lead writer for the Journal’s MarketBeat blog, which he helped turn into one of the most heavily trafficked web properties at the Journal. He spends much of his time trying to force bankers, traders and economists to speak comprehensible English.

Megan Reback (@meganreback) is the Assistant to the Group Publisher of Quartz. A former news intern for Talking Points Memo, she graduated from Connecticut College cum laude in May 2012 with a B.A. in English and Government. Prior to joining Quartz, Megan worked with Planned Parenthood and V-Day, and wrote for publications on women’s issues.

Zach Seward (@zseward) is obsessed with new forms of storytelling, which is what keeps him occupied as senior editor of Quartz. He leads a group of journalists with backgrounds in data wrangling, programming, and interaction design. He does not usually refer to himself in the third person. Zach previously worked at The Wall Street Journal, first as a reporter covering education and health, then as the editor of outreach and social media. Before that, he helped launch the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard, where he was an assistant editor and reported on the news industry. He also teaches digital journalism skills as an adjunct professor at NYU and previously taught at Columbia. Zach knew he wanted to be a journalist at age six but couldn’t have imagined, back then, what it would mean to be in this profession today. He is still, frankly, a little confused but happily so.

Justin B. Smith is president of Atlantic Media, the corporate parent of Quartz and publisher of The Atlantic, National Journal, and Government Executive. Justin is a central author of the vision for Quartz and oversees its business, editorial, and technical staff. He has led the transformation of Atlantic Media over the past five years through a digital-first strategy that has generated historic revenue, profits, and readership. Prior to joining, Justin was president and publisher of THE WEEK magazine, where he introduced the US edition in 2001. He led corporate strategy for The Economist Group in London, Hong Kong, and New York and began his media career at the International Herald Tribune in Hong Kong and Paris. Justin is also the founder of Breaking Media LLC, the Bali Purnati Center for The Arts, and the Ouagadougou Education Project.

Gretchen Sword (@gretchensword) is the National Director of Advertising at Quartz. She was most recently at Bloomberg where she served as West Coast Director and Territory Manager in San Francisco, CA.  At Bloomberg, she worked her way from being an Account Executive based at Bloomberg Headquarters in New York, to the Chicago market, and ultimately started the West Coast-based ad sales office. She began her career in New York where she also had the great fortune of working at both Forbes and Esquire Magazine.  She developed a keen interest in all things advertising from her maternal grandfather, an ad man during the days of Mad Men.  Gretchen is passionate about digital and emerging media with a particular penchant for global business and economic news.  She accredits this fascination to her paternal grandfather and father’s life’s work as investment bankers both at Morgan Stanley and at her family’s firm, Wm Sword & Co.

David Yanofsky (@YAN0) is a reporter creating data driven and visual stories for Quartz. He uses the principles of design and the power of development to try to tell stories in the best ways the internet can allow. A self taught practitioner of Javascript, Processing, Python, and R he previously worked for Bloomberg creating interactive stories for its web sites, television stations, radio broadcasts, and magazines. Prior to Bloomberg he was a freelance graphic designer, screen printer, and book maker. He obsesses over appropriate representations of information and an empty inbox.