Exodus begins at BusinessWeek

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

A number of top-notch staffers at BusinessWeek magazine have left or announced their intention to leave the weekly business magazine in the past few weeks.

Many of these staffers are leaving amid rumors that there will be dramatic reductions in the number of journalists working for the magazine once it is sold.

Brian Grow, a senior writer who worked on investigative projects out of the Atlanta bureau, has left the magazine to work at the Center for Public Integrity, an investigative reporting operation based out of Washington.

Grow joined BusinessWeek as a staff writer in 2004 covering retail, airlines, telecom, immigration, and computer security. In 2008, his series on the business of poverty was a finalist for a National Magazine Award and two Loeb Awards and won a Sigma Delta Chi Award, a National Press Club Award, a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award, and The James Aronson Award for Social Justice, among others.

Others who have also announced that they’re leaving or have left include:

1. Keith Epstein, a correspondent in BusinessWeek’s Washington bureau, working on investigative pieces. From 1986 until 1999, Epstein was an investigative reporter in the Washington bureau of The Cleveland Plain Dealer and Newhouse News Service. His work has included examinations of medical experimentation on patients without their consent, and preventable transportation disasters that recurred while fixes made their way through federal bureaucracies.

2. David Kiley, a senior correspondent in BusinessWeek’s Detroit bureau. Previously, he was marketing editor. Prior to this, he was Detroit bureau chief for USA Today. Kiley has held editor and reporter posts at Adweek, Brandweek, and CNN. He has also worked in the advertising industry. Kiley is the author of “Getting The Bugs Out: The Rise, Fall and Comeback of Volkswagen in America,” winner of the Ken Purdy Award for Excellence in Automotive Industry Journalism in 2001, and “Driven: Inside BMW, The Most Admired Car Company in the World.” He was the 2005-2006 president of the International Motor Press Association.

3. Aaron Pressman, a correspondent in BusinessWeek’s Boston bureau. He was previously senior market columnist at TheStreet.com and a reporter for Bloomberg News in Boston. Prior to that, he was a senior writer at The Industry Standard. He previously spent 12 years covering finance and technology for a variety of publications in Washington, D.C., and New York. He created an Internet and politics beat at Reuters in 1997 and was a freelance contributor to Wired.

Epstein is going to Huffington Post, he talls Talking Biz News, working on its investigative project, while Pressman is joining Reuters in its Boston bureau, where he will cover investments and wealth management. Kiley says he is going to write a screenplay and going to work at a firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., called Icon Creative Solutions, which creates Web-based content for companies.