AP biz columnist Beck leaving service

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Hal Ritter, the business editor at the Associated Press, sent out the following announcement to the staff on Wednesday:

After an 18-year career at the AP that started as an editorial assistant in the New York City bureau, Rachel Beck is leaving us next week to begin a career as a coach for people applying to Top 10 business schools. Rachel is joining mbaMission, a company that helps aspiring MBAs prepare their applications and prepare for interviews. As you may know, Rachel has an MBA from one of those Top 10 schools – Columbia Business School.

Rachel’s departure will be a big loss for Business News and the AP. This is the only news organization she has worked for since getting a master’s in journalism at Columbia in 1993 and then taking the chance that she could join the AP on a bottom rung and work her way up. Indeed she has. She moved to Business News just 20 months after starting here and began covering the airline industry. She then served as night supervisor, and for four years covered retailers and e-commerce companies. In 2000, she was selected to be a Bagehot Fellow at Columbia, and she stayed an extra year to complete work on her MBA. When she returned in 2002, she became the AP’s national business columnist. In recent years, she has been a versatile reporter always ready to tackle the big issue emerging in the world of business and finance, either as columnist or news reporter. And, of course, she has anchored since 2007 our much-acclaimed annual report on executive compensation.

We’ll miss Rachel’s many talents, her passion for business news and her sense of team in all she does. We’ll miss her presence in the newsroom. Please join me in wishing her the best as she strikes out in a new direction that will build on both her education and experience here.

Our take: This is a big loss for the AP biz desk, as Ritter rarely, if ever, acknowledges when a staffer leaves.