Mike Isaac

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Former Wired Digital Editor Heads to Obvious Corp.

Evan Hansen, former editor in chief of Wired.com, has joined Obvious Corp. as a senior editor, he announced on Thursday.

Obvious Corp. is the brainchild of Ev Williams and Biz Stone, the two Twitter co-founders who left their daily roles at the microblogging service to re-form their small incubator, which is now also home to startups like Branch.

Hansen will work specifically on Medium, the pet project of Williams and Stone, which aims to re-think blogging and content platforms.

“Our goal is to create new publishing tools and a new kind of content platform that encourages and rewards high quality writing — not just the lastest post at the top of the feed,” Hansen wrote in an email to friends and colleagues on Thursday.

Hansen was editor in chief at Wired.com for more than seven years, and previously was a section editor at CNET news. (Disclosure: Hansen was also my boss when I wrote for Wired before working here at AllThingsD.)

Hansen’s move is one in a string of recent migrations by journalists into the startup space. New York Times editor David F. Gallagher left the paper to go to Kickstarter earlier this year. And last year saw CNET’s long-time writer Rafe Needleman land at Evernote in a sort of evangelist position, with the intent to expand Evernote’s platform and work with developers.

Hansen will also work to expand platform, though from an editorial standpoint. “I’ll be in charge of developing editorial out of San Francisco with a focus on technology, science and business,” he wrote. “After years handling business, admin and tech problems, it feels great to get back to writing and editing.”

Update 4:50 pm PST: Post amended to correct Hansen’s title, which is senior editor, charged with leading coverage of technology and science.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald