Bloomberg names new leadership for US health coverage

Crayton Harrison, managing editor of global business Americas, and Brian Bremner, global business senior executive editor, at Bloomberg News sent out the following on new leadership for its U.S. health team:

All, we’re pleased to announce today a new leadership structure for our health team, which has grown both in size and influence in the past few years.

In the course of our conversations about the role of health team leader, it became apparent that we had an embarrassing wealth of talent to put to work. That’s why we decided to promote three people to jobs that will help us deliver on the full potential of our terrific health reporters, as well as better tap the resources of other parts of the newsroom.

Cynthia Koons is our new U.S. Health Team Leader, responsible for working with reporters to set targets for sourcing and scoops; organizing our beat structure to position us to win on breaking news; developing the writing and reporting skills of our talent; helping identify themes and pitches for long-term investigations and features; scouting for new potential hires; and leading as a reporter with her own collection of scoops and enterprise. She will draw from her expertise as a scoop-getter, from her time as a WSJ deals reporter to her work at Bloomberg covering the Valeant scandal, and her time as a successful feature and enterprise writer.

Kristen V. Brown becomes Prognosis editor, responsible for working across the global health teams and other parts of the newsroom on our vertical about the future of health care. She’ll help develop targets for long-term projects, including feature-length stories, podcasts, video, investigations and graphics. That will mean working in conjunction with Cynthia to balance reporters’ time and resources to make sure we can cover the news while making progress on big-picture endeavors. Kristen will also be our main liaison to digital, video and other parts of the operation, with a mission to expand and define the Prognosis brand with them. Like Cynthia, she’ll also continue to report and develop her own enterprise, building on a body of work that includes her BW cover story on 23andMe and her podcast series on vaccine skepticism, “Doubt.”

John Lauerman becomes a senior editor, responsible for running day-to-day coverage of this-just-in news across the U.S. Health team, organizing and assigning event coverage and managing breaking news in coordination with the Global Business edit pool. John has built essential links between our U.S. team and other parts of the global newsroom, especially Europe and Africa, and we want him to build on those relationships. He’ll work with Cynthia and the reporters to develop coverage plans on big news events and handles some of our most important daily stories and short-term enterprise. John, who will complete his second decade at Bloomberg in June, has covered some of the biggest health and science stories of our time, from the SARS, bird flu and swine flu outbreaks to Nobel-winning science from Crispr to stem cells to RNA interference. He’s been an essential part of our pandemic coverage as a writer and editor.

All three will report to Crayton. They’ll also work closely with Drew Armstrong, who remains the senior editor who reports, writes and leads some of our biggest global projects in health care.

As we announced previously, current health team leader Tim Annett is moving to a new role in Global Business. He’ll be responsible for editing some of our biggest daily news stories, helping improve the quality of our writing and working with other parts of the newsroom to better promote our work.

Please join us in congratulating them all. We’ll be working to hand over responsibilities by the beginning of April.