Felix Salmon Joining Reuters Opinion Start-Up

If you spend much time on Portfolio.com, you've probably noticed that Felix Salmon has opinions. Lots of them. More than any one person should be allowed to have, probably. On finance, sure, but also on food, architecture, climate change, men's grooming, and, of course, media, to name just a few topics.

So if you're a global financial news service and you're looking to seriously beef up your opinion offerings, Felix is a pretty good place to start. Thomson Reuters recognized this and hired him away to work on a new, yet-to-be-christened online opinion hub set to launch at some point this summer. He starts April 1.

"I am sort of their -- I guess you could call it 'headline blogger,'" he says. Beyond doing what he's done here every day for the past two years -- in more than 4,000 individual posts -- he'll also have a role as what he terms an "in-house evangelist," helping to tutor the other 25 journalists on his team in the art of blogging. "I'm going to be the person going, 'Yeah, yeah, yeah, blog, it's great,' and I'm going to be the person saying, 'Of course you can do that, and, no, you don't need me to edit it, and the faster you can put it up the better, and don't worry about being wrong.'" He'll report to Jonathan Ford, the co-founder and former deputy editor of BreakingViews, who was named commentary editor of Reuters last November.

While a new Market Movers blogger has yet to be named, there are plans in the works to expand Portfolio.com's coverage of markets and personal finance in coming months, says managing editor Mark Stein. "Felix has been a terrific colleague," he says. "We wish him well, and look forward to working with him at Reuters." And Felix returns the sentiments, saying of the Portfolio.com team, "They're lovely people and I look forward to working with them lots more in the future."