Bloomberg Atlanta bureau chief leaving the biz

Adam Levy, the Atlanta bureau chief of Bloomberg News who grew its operations in the South from a one-person shop operating out of the attic of his Decatur home into an eight-person bureau in downtown covering an 11-state region, announced his resignation from the wire service Wednesday after 13 years.

Levy is becoming a partner in Atlanta-based Ahmann Boyette Levy, an Atlanta-based public policy, economic development and communications strategy consulting firm.

His departure marks the third bureau chief to leave Bloomberg in the past month. The Los Angeles and Boston bureau chiefs have also quit recently.

In 1998, Levy was named a senior writer for Bloomberg Markets, the company’s magazine. He also co-wrote the book “The People vs. Big Tobacco,” which was about the landmark 1997 tobacco industry settlement. Levy was also one of the first journalists to criticize Enron and its accounting. Levy was a former securities analyst at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette in New York before entering journalism in the late 1980s.

He won numerous major national and regional journalism awards, including the Gerald Loeb Award in 2002. He is a three-time winner of the Society of Professional Journalist’s Green Eyeshade award and twice has won awards from the Society of American Business Editors and Writers. He has been a finalist for awards given by the Investigative Reporters and Editors and the National Headliner Awards. Before joining Bloomberg, Levy covered banking and financial services for the Tampa Tribune.

Levy was president of the Atlanta Press Club in 2002.

On a personal note, Adam and I worked together at both the Tribune and at Bloomberg. In recent years, he has come to speak to my “Business Reporting” class at UNC and has sat on the advisory board to the Carolina Business News Initiative. He is one of the best business journalists I have ever worked with, and him leaving the field will create a void.