Layoffs at Bloomberg News amid reorganization

Bloomberg News has reorganized a part of the newsroom into a “breaking news” team to handle first versions and first 15 mins of breaking news, mainly to focus an expanded breaking news team to catch and break news faster.

The reorganization has resulted in about a half-dozen layoffs, multiple sources have told Talking Biz News.

Senior executive editor for breaking news and markets Chris Collins sent out the following note to the staff on Thursday:

To all in Bloomberg Editorial & Research,

Winning on market-moving news is critical to our audience and our success as a news organization, and we need to constantly adapt the ways in which we gather, produce and deliver breaking stories, improve our judgment and urgency and embrace evolving technologies. To that effect, we are reorganizing the Speed Desk and renaming it Breaking News. Even more so than today, the global team will be the front line for all incoming news, via all sources from press releases to social media, and will oversee the first stages of our response — headlines, first story, alarm-raising, and so on. Success in this area won’t only mean faster and smarter coverage, but also that our beat reporting teams can be less reactive and spend more time breaking news of their own.

Sarah Kopit becomes Managing Editor for Breaking News in the Americas. Sonali Pathirana will relocate to London as ME for EMEA, and Katherine Cho will be the ME for Asia. The three MEs will report to Steve Foxwell in New York. We are also posting three team leader positions, one in each region, on PATH <GO>.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that our progress in this area is increasingly dependent on the development of smart technology, from text extraction to content automation, machine learning and data science. Edith Moy will head a group of senior editors to help lead projects such as the Cyborg earnings initiative. Working with News Development, Brad Skillman‘s automation team, our colleagues in Core and teams across the newsroom, this team will build on our progress with earnings and tackle new projects to improve how we process and produce content on all corporate actions.

Marco Babic‘s team, already tasked with similar in the economics world, will join the Breaking News group so we have a unified strategy. Gelu Sulugiuc in Copenhagen will oversee the quality, competitiveness and volume of our flash headlines globally.

I’m sad to say that as part of this reorganization some of our colleagues left the company today. We didn’t take this decision lightly. We wish them well and thank them for their hard work.

Chris