Bloomberg makes changes to newsroom technology team

Bloomberg senior executive editor Chris Collins sent out the following announcement to the staff:

Hi all,

I am delighted to announce some exciting changes to the leadership and structure of teams responsible for newsroom technology and workflow.

Monique White will become head of a combined Technology & Tools group, overseeing the products we use for reporting, editing and distribution of coverage, from publication systems to models that spot trends in data.

We have long said that innovation is crucial to our journalism. Monique, who has been at the company for a decade, has driven our efforts to leverage machine learning to break news, and has collaborated with news teams and Global Data, Core Product, CTO and Engineering on projects that have made our coverage faster and smarter. Among her priorities will be the development of systems that improve our news-gathering and editing processes, which have faced enormous challenges as we have all adapted to working from home.

Under Monique, there will be four main groups:

Adam Laniyan is promoted to global head of Operations & Tools Support. Adam previously managed tech and ops for Businessweek and Markets magazines and brings invaluable experience to this new role as we seek further integration between our various platforms and products. Reporting to Monique, Adam’s team will be the first point of contact for journalists for all questions or issues around technology, functionality and products. They will work with Sara Dacombe and her team to maintain business continuity plans across bureaus.

Sean Lecky will head a Tools & Workflows group, overseeing the creation of new tools such as the NCAS publishing system. Working closely with reporters, editors and our colleagues in Engineering, this group will focus on platforms and technologies that make our day-to-day workflow easier, reliable and more efficient.

Lina Vourgidou succeeds Monique as head of AI & Extraction, handling models for sentiment detection and topic classification. Andrew Milne will run a team specializing in Cyborg, our platform for automated stories on coverage from earnings to economics, as well as web scraping, headline generation and automated story templates.

Also reporting to Monique, Clay Eltzroth will continue to oversee our flagship AI-driven products like Streams and Talk. Linda Williamson will be the team leader for operations in Asia, with day-to-day oversight of initiatives in the region, reporting to Adam. Mike Waterhouse, who has expertly managed operations in the Americas, will join Sean’s group as a product manager, with responsibility for editing workflow.

Essential to all these changes and efforts will be the ongoing collaboration with the outstanding Engineering teams managed by Ram Aiyengar, Anju Kambadur and Niraj Juthani, as well as the data news and automation groups under Steve Foxwell, Claudia Quinonez and Lauren Berry. As we said in April, Koray Oncel is joining Core and we will continue to work closely with him and Steve Ross’s team.

Monique, Adam and the rest of the group want your input and ideas as we move forward, to ensure our editorial and technology goals are aligned. And we will post more opportunities in this space on PATH <GO> in due course.

Thanks to the whole team for your efforts and leadership this year – and congrats!