US business magazine Fortune has hired six journalists from tech site GigaOm, which suddenly closed last month, nine years after it was founded by Om Malik.
Stacey Higginbotham, Barb Darrow, Katie Fehrenbacher, Mathew Ingram, Jeff John Roberts and Jonathan Vanian are all joining the Time Inc-owned magazine, which publishes the Fortune 500 list of the largest companies in terms of revenue in the US.
The six hires account for a third of GigaOm’s former editorial staff, and takes Fortune’s tech team from nine to 15 writers under section editor Andrew Nusca.
In a post published on Fortune, Nusca wrote: “Fortune has always covered how technology is changing the workplace – 85 years of publishing prove it – but things are changing faster and more dramatically than ever before.
“Look for our newly expanded team to double down on covering the technologies that are remaking the foundations of global business, from cloud computing and data analytics to machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
Time CEO Joe Ripp had reportedly been in negotiations to buy GigaOm before deciding to hire the journalists, many of whom were senior writers for the site.
Fortune editor Alan Murray told the New York Post: “They [Time Inc executives] took a serious look at it, but felt this was the better way to go.”
Malik announced in a blog post in March that GigaOm’s assets were in the hands of lenders. The site had previously raised $30m (£20m) in funding, but failed to make enough money from a combination of advertising, paid-for research and events to continue operations.
The writers joining Fortune will focus on the magazine’s digital platforms but will also contribute to the print magazine and appear at Fortune events.
Fortune has been seeking to increase the amount of content it produces to attract more visitors since it lost referrals from CNN when Time Warner split its broadcast and publishing divisions into separate companies.
