Sarah_Lacy_6x6 By
On April 13, 2012

I’ve been blown away by the team we’re building at PandoDaily. Particularly since we (mostly) didn’t go the traditional blog-raiding route in hiring. When I find people who exceed my expectations and are fun to work with, I want to make sure we get more out of them and treat them well enough that they stick around.

So I’m thrilled to announce that our LA-based correspondent Michael Carney is joining us as a full-time reporter starting Monday. (That’s Michael in the above picture, celebrating the news earlier today. Just kidding.)

Carney started out like Hamish McKenzie – he was just a guy who sent in a contributed post. It did pretty well, so we asked for another one. And then, another one. A month later, and he’s done more than a dozen stories for us, including many exclusives, breaking news, and LA-culture pieces.

I’m a big believer that something special is happening in the LA-tech scene (finally!), so we asked Michael to join us full time to cover it more in-depth. If you live in Southern California, and you don’t know him already, I’m surprised because this guy networks his ass off like any self-respecting Angelino. If you don’t know him yet — get to.

My other big news is that we’re promoting Nathan Pensky. Nathan joined us as a copy editor in February. It was sort of an experiment, since many blogs don’t have copy editors. But he’s rapidly become much, much more. He vets all our guest posts, helps source art work and illustrations, and keeps the trains running while I’m running around reporting or being all CEO-like. You can see a direct correlation, not only in the professionalism of our copy, but the pacing and flow of news and volume of posts, since he joined. He’s become an invaluable resource to me, our contributors, and the full time editorial staff.

It recently struck me that he was essentially doing the job of managing editor. So we decided to make it official. Nathan will continue to make sure that PandoDaily dots its i’s and crosses its t’s as we add more staff, write more content, and strive to get even better.

Huge congrats to both of them! Both are big wins for us.

Sarah_Lacy_6x6
Sarah Lacy is the founder and editor-in-chief of PandoDaily. She is an award winning journalist and author of two critically acclaimed books, "Once You're Lucky, Twice You're Good: The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web 2.0" (Gotham Books, May 2008) and "Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit from Global Chaos" (Wiley, February 2011). She has been covering technology news for over 15 years, most recently as a senior editor for TechCrunch.