The Information is pleased to announce the hiring of three new reporters—Sara Germano, Sri Muppidi and Catherine Perloff—as well as the return of veteran reporter Kevin McLaughlin.

Sara Germano will join The Information’s Weekend section from the Financial Times on Dec. 2, covering the business and future of sports—with a strong focus on women’s sports.

Germano is a veteran of this coverage. After attending Fordham University, she started working for The Wall Street Journal, where she reported on Nike, the Olympics and, even more broadly, Germany and Europe while living in Berlin.

She departed The Journal for the FT in 2020, pioneering a sports business beat for the paper. In 2020, she won an award from the Society for Business Editors and Writers for her stories on racial diversity within sports companies and in their advertising. We look forward to many more stories like her John Henry profile, which hits a hard-to-reach sweet spot: It’s both newsy and a damn good read. Sara will work from our New York office.

Kevin McLaughlin is returning as a senior reporter to help our team cover the biggest stories in enterprise technology, artificial intelligence and the cloud, and serve as a resource for our newsroom. Kevin shaped the collaborative culture of The Information and wrote some of its most impactful stories during his 2016-2023 tenure. For instance, his sleuthy reporting forced DataRobot’s CEO and executive staff to resign. He brought readers deep inside Amazon Web Services and other cloud providers to uncover problems with products and data center practices.

McLaughlin also has a knack for making predictions that come true, like when he wrote that Slack would be acquired or the CEO of Google Cloud would get the boot. He was instrumental in our early coverage of OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, alongside Aaron. And just before he left last summer, he told our AI reporters how the relationship between Nvidia and its biggest customers was going to get a lot more complicated (and it did).

Last year, McLaughlin took a leave of absence while staying in close touch with us. We couldn’t be happier to have him back, starting Monday Oct. 28 in San Francisco.

Catherine Perloff will cover the intersection of media, advertising and AI.

She joins us from Adweek, where over the past three years she has broken a multitude of scoops on subjects ranging from Google sales reps encouraging advertisers to target teens against their own policies to Oracle’s plans for exiting the ad business, and financial services giant Intuit entering the advertising market.

Before Adweek, Perloff covered bankruptcy and distressed debt for Debtwire, where she learned the art of cold calling people in finance, and earlier interned at Forbes, Catherine is a graduate of Tufts. She started Nov. 11 in New York.

Sri Muppidi is joining us from Business Insider to cover venture capital and startups. At BI, she scooped Index Ventures’ layoffs and numerous funding rounds for AI startups including Abnormal Security, Kong, Chainguard and Vanta. Previously she was a Marjorie Deane fellow at The Economist, where she wrote about Scale AI and other topics. In a rare feat for a fellow, she pitched and penned a “leader” on technology companies’ struggle to develop software or devices suitable for women. Her writing on defense tech was also shortlisted for the 2021 Financial Times and McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize.

While working on her Master’s in management science and engineering at Stanford, Muppidi co-founded Wordsmith AI, a startup developing an AI writing copilot, in 2018. She later worked as a product manager at fintech Capchase and spent four years as an investor at Emerson Collective and Sierra Ventures before realizing she would rather chase news than deals, as well as return to writing. As an undergrad majoring in economics, she wrote a novella on the 2007 recession as her honors thesis.

Sri is a Bay Area native and lives in San Francisco. She started Nov. 4.