Bloomberg shuffles tech news beats

Brad Stone, named global head of technology coverage at Bloomberg in September, sent the following to the tech news staff:

Dear Colleagues in Bloomberg Tech:

Our first few weeks as a separate entity have been fun and a little bit frantic. We’ve witnessed turmoil at Twitter, a new iPhone, Amazon’s unexpected ban on competing TV products from Google and Apple and potentially the largest deal in tech history – the proposed acquisition of EMC by Dell.

With all that action, I haven’t yet gotten a chance to reach out, explain some recent moves and tell you about the values I want to bring to our small but growing band of rebels.

As most of you already know, Tom Giles is our executive editor and is running the day-to-day tech coverage around the world. Jillian Ward, who ran the San Francisco tech team so ably for the last nine months, has become the permanent U.S. team leader. By the end of the year, our Tokyo-based managing editor Peter Elstrom will begin dedicating his considerable efforts exclusively to tech and he’ll lead our coverage in Asia.

In San Francisco, we have freshened up some beats. Brian Womack, who fearlessly led our coverage of Google for the last few years, has moved over to covering enterprise companies like Salesforce and Dell while retaining the reliably interesting Yahoo. Jack Clark, who joined us over a year ago, slides over to Google where he will cover its curious transformation into the moonshot-launching Alphabet. Eric Newcomer, previously our startups reporter, is training his sights on the on-demand juggernauts Uber, Lyft and Airbnb. In New York, Joshua Brustein will focus his attention on the technology-themed disruptions to the media and advertising businesses.

I’m also thrilled to announce that Alex Webb, a standout Bloomberg industry reporter in Munich, will move to the Bay Area by the beginning of next year to cover the most highly-valued, most secretive company in the world: Apple. And very soon, we will announce the first additions to our new San Francisco-based venture capital group.

Now a brief word on the values and metabolism of our new team: As a book author and journalist over the last 20 years at Newsweek, The New York Times and Bloomberg Businessweek, my basic approach has been to tell deeply-reported stories about the companies and people who are changing the way we work and live. Nothing pleased me more than ferreting out closely guarded-secrets, writing a smart story on an under-covered company or powerful executive or finding ways to take on a potentially dense subject with crisp, accessible prose, free of jargon and cliches.

I want Global Tech to adopt that same approach. That means we all have to get better: not only at relentlessly breaking news and staying atop the companies in our respective portfolios, but by finding the right time to step back and explain this rapidly changing world to our readers in a compelling way. It also means some of us will have to go back to trusting our instincts as reporters and editors about what merits coverage (and what does not) and to developing our facility as writers.

To do this we have a tremendous number of platforms at our disposal: the terminal, Bloomberg.com, Businessweek, Bloomberg TV, our conference business. And in the coming months we’ll take a careful look at podcasts and other new digital ventures. I don’t know of any other news organization that is making such a deep investment in technology journalism. I’m excited to be a part of it.

And please reach out to me any time with questions.