Sarah Hurst has been selected as the editor of North of 60 Mining News starting with the February issue.

Hurst has more than 15 years experience as a journalist and editor. Most recently she was editor of Russian Far East News; before that she was chief sub-editor with BBC Monitoring in Azerbaijan, editor of Beijing Journal and in the mid-1990s a reporter at the St. Petersburg Press, a weekly Russian newspaper where she specialized in politics.

Hurst covered the 1995 Duma elections, meeting prominent politicians including Grigory Yavlinsky and the late Galina Starovoitova. She attended the opening of the Duma in 1996 in Moscow.

Hurst received her BA Honors degree in History and Russian in 1995 from the University of Birmingham in England, and studied anthropology and playwriting in 2002 at the University of Alaska Anchorage.

Curt Freeman, geologist and Mining News columnist, has been Hurst's mentor at the newspaper since she came on board last fall. Freeman's Mining News column and commentary will be back in Mining News next month.