by Guy Page
Geeta Anand, a Dartmouth College grad, Rutland Herald court reporter, Wall Street Journal Pulitzer Prize-winning story reporter, and (most recently) Dean of University of California – Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, has been named editor-in-chief at VTDigger, Vermont’s largest news media operation.
VTDigger announced the new hire via email at 9:18 AM Wednesday, April 30.
Anand will lead a news staff of 20, not counting two interns. Founded in 2009 by Anne Galloway as Vermont’s first major online-only news outlet, VTDigger became a project of the nonprofit Vermont Journalism Trust in 2011. Anand succeeds interim Editor-in-Chief Neil Goswami, who replaced E-I-C Paul Heintz.
Quoting verbatim from her current Cal-Berkeley website page:
Anand is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author who serves as dean and professor at Berkeley Journalism. Her stories on corporate corruption won the Wall Street Journal a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and she was lead reporter in a series on healthcare that was a finalist in 2003.
She wrote the non-fiction book, The Cure, about a dad’s fight to save his kids by starting a biotech company to make a medicine for their untreatable illness, which was made into the Harrison Ford movie Extraordinary Measures in 2010.
She worked as a journalist for 27 years, most recently as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal in India. She began her career at a free weekly newspaper, Cape Cod News, and then covered local government and courts at the Rutland Herald in Vermont. At her next job at the Boston Globe, she served as City Hall bureau chief and then covered the Massachusetts State House.
She spent the next 17 years as a reporter and senior writer for the Wall Street Journal, where she covered the biotech beat and focused on investigative reporting. She spent nearly a decade in India, the country where she was born and raised, first as a foreign correspondent for the Journal and then The New York Times. She met her husband, Gregory Kroitzsh, in college. During her time as a foreign correspondent in India, he started Mumbai’s first microbrewery. They have two daughters who are in college in the U.S. She began teaching at Berkeley Journalism in 2018.
EDUCATION
Dartmouth College, B.A., History, Honours, Women’s Studies Certificate