Baruch professor Mills to head Bloomberg's education coverage

Baruch College journalism professor Joshua Mills, who is a board member of the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, is leaving his academic post to head up Bloomberg News’ efforts in covering the world of education, from kindergarten all the way up to college.

Bloomberg has decided that it wants a team of six or eight reporters based around the country that will cover policy, economic and business issues, from pre-K through graduate school, from property taxes used to support school systems to how university invest their endowments and school systems’ their pension funds to the transparency and accountability of the massive public universities around the country.

Bloomberg has asked Mills to lead this effort, hire the reporters and direct their coverage, and, as he said, “I could not resist. My title will be ‘education team leader,’ and I start in mid-July.”

Mills, director of the master’s program in business journalism that is coming to an end with the beginning of the master’s program at CUNY, has worked as a business journalist for more than 20 years, half of that at The New York Times as an editor and reporter. He has written about technology for Bloomberg News, Family PC, Home PC, Graphis and other publications and has written on a wide variety of subjects for Esquire, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, New York, TV Guide, Stereo Review, Columbia Journalism Review and other publications. He has also worked as a reporter or editor at the Newark (N.J.) Star-Ledger, The Associated Press, The New York Post, the New York Daily News and Newsday.

Mills has long been involved in training journalists and for many years ran copy editing programs for the Dow Jones Newspaper Fund. More recently he served as the U.S. director of the Bertelsmann Summer Academy, a training program for German business journalists. Until recently, he was head of the education committee at SABEW.

Mills is interested in hiring reporters interested in covering education. You can reach him at joshmills@optonline.net.