Buyouts hitting Atlanta biz desk

A number of business journalists at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution are likely to take the newspaper’s latest buyout offer and leave the daily.

Business section designer Paige Oliver Taylor and business reporter Bill Hendrick confirmed to Talking Biz News that they have signed up for the buyout and will be leaving next month.

Others on the business desk are undecided, with some leaning toward taking the offer. The deadline to file for the buyout is Thursday.

Taylor has been at the paper since April 2002, and she had been an assistant business editor who led a team of reporters who covered economic development, commercial/residential real estate, work place and markets until the reorganization last year. She now oversees visuals for the business section. Â

She was the business editor of the Newport News Daily Press in Virginia from April 2000 to March 2002, and previously worked at The Tennessean and at the Huntsville Times.

Hendrick, who joined the paper in March 1979, currently covers the business of health and biotechnology. He was an assistant business editor for about six years, and was founding editor in 1983 of the paper’s Business Monday section.

Hendrick also spent eight years with the AP, winding up in Manhattan first as business news supervisor (for the whole AP) and then as an editor on the AP’s foreign desk.

“I’m remembered by a few friends for predicting the stock market crash of ’87 with a three-day series of front page stories entitled, ‘Is the bubble about to burst?'” said Hendrick. “It did two months later. And I covered that, too, from the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and an old computer with acoustic cups.”

Talking Biz News will cover more announcements from the AJC buyout later this week.