The Atlantic Hires Ellen Cushing To Lead New San Francisco Bureau as Senior Tech Editor

The Atlantic announced today that Ellen Cushing is joining its Technology section as a senior editor. Cushing will help to establish and lead a new bureau in San Francisco, as The Atlantic grows both its reporting team and coverage dedicated to technology and Silicon Valley. She will begin with The Atlantic next month.

“Ellen comes aboard at a time when we are aggressively expanding our coverage of Silicon Valley,” said The Atlantic’s editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and editor of TheAtlantic.com Adrienne LaFrance. “From our earliest conversations with her, we could see that among all the candidates we considered, she had the most developed and sophisticated ideas about how to carry out this expansion.”

Under the leadership of Ross Andersen, editor of The Atlantic’s Science, Technology, and Health sections, Cushing will shape The Atlantic’s reporting on the companies, individuals, and shifting centers of power in Silicon Valley. She will work closely with The Atlantic’s staff writers on this beat, including Alexis Madrigal and Alana Semuels, both in the Bay Area, and Taylor Lorenz, who is joining The Atlantic at the end of the month from The Daily Beast. The Atlantic plans to fill out the San Francisco bureau with several additional hires this year.

Cushing comes to The Atlantic after more than three years as an enterprise and tech editor at BuzzFeed News. In addition to managing a team of investigative reporters, Cushing led all of BuzzFeed’s enterprise reporting on sexual assault and harassment. She previously was a senior editor at San Francisco magazine and staff writer and editor at East Bay Express.

Technology is one of the key areas of editorial focus as The Atlantic undertakes a large-scale expansion over the coming year. In addition to the San Francisco bureau, The Atlantic will grow its coverage of Hollywood and culture, and its politics and policy reporting in Washington. Earlier this year, The Atlantic debuted a new Family section.

Other recent hires include Lauren N. Williams as a senior editor and Hannah Giorgis as a staff writer on the Culture team; Adam Harris as a staff writer covering education; longtime political journalist Christi Parsons to lead The Atlantic’s newly formed Talent Lab; and Katherine Wells as executive producer of The Atlantic’s portfolio of original podcasts.