AP biz writer leaving for Reuters

Associated Press business editor Hal Ritter sent out the following staff announcement on Thursday:

Sorry to report that Michelle Conlin is leaving us for a job at Reuters as an enterprise writer. Michelle has done a lot of good stories for us the past year, and we’ll miss her writerly touch. Perhaps her best story was a report on people whose homes were foreclosed on mistakenly. It was honored by SABEW earlier this year with a second place in feature writing among new agencies.

Michelle will be here through next week. Please join me in wishing her the best in her new job.

Conlin, who joined the AP in 2010, previously worked for 11 years at BusinessWeek and was a senior writer when she left earlier this year. She started the working life beat at BW, which focused on workplace issues and trends. She wrote more than two dozen cover stories while covering this popular beat. Before Business Week, Conlin was a staff writer for Forbes magazine in Chicago. She also was an associate producer at CNNfn and a reporter at The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Conlin was co-producer of ‘No Impact Man,’ a documentary film about her family’s one-year experiment trying to minimize impact on the environment. The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2009 and was distributed nationally.

Conlin has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from Connecticut College and a master’s in journalism from Columbia University.