Reuters losing West Coast tech editor to Bloomberg, reporter to Business Insider

Dina Contini, the West Coast bureau chief for Reuters, sent out the following announcement Tuesday evening:

I regret to announce that Edwin Chan and Alexei Oreskovic are leaving Reuters.

Edwin will be joining Bloomberg as Asia technology editor in Hong Kong. A Reuters veteran, he came on board as an editorial assistant in 1997 in Singapore. He went from getting coffee for Asia-deskers and fixing office equipment to being accepted to the graduate trainee program and eventually running bureaus in Shanghai and Hong Kong during China’s first overseas-IPO wave. He then moved to Los Angeles and San Francisco as West Coast Equities EIC. Most recently, he covered Alibaba and other Chinese Internet companies from Silicon Valley. Edwin says the highlights of his 17-year career include sending the snap on China’s first currency revaluation in over a decade that beat Bloomberg by over a minute, and getting detained (and then plied with food and liquor) by security officials for daring to try and cover an outbreak of AIDS in central Henan province. Most recently, he enjoyed a front-row seat to the show of our times: how Silicon Valley is transforming the business and consumer worlds. The many reporters he has helped over the years remember his generosity and willingness to go the extra mile to put their stories on the wire. We will all miss him for his calm under pressure and his utter professionalism.

Alexei will join Business Insider as a senior editor in San Francisco. He joined Reuters in 2009 to cover the consumer Internet business, including Google and up-and-coming companies such as Facebook and Twitter. Over the years, Alexei has covered Facebook and Twitter’s initial public offerings, Google’s expansion from Internet search into industries such as automobiles and wearable computers and on the regulatory scrutiny that has increasingly focused on the Web industry. Yahoo, another company on Alexei’s patch, has cycled through five different CEOs during his six years on the job. Whether he was body-checked by Apple flaks for getting too close to Steve Jobs or dealing with an angry Jack Dorsey for calling the Twitter co-founder’s mother on her private phone, Alexei remained unruffled in his pursuit of the news. The consummate team player, he always jumped in to help no matter what the story and he will be greatly missed by his colleagues.

I want to thank both of them for their contribution and wish them the very best in their careers.

In an email to Talking Biz News on Tuesday evening, Chan wrote:

I’m sad to leave Reuters after an amazing 17-year-run that’s taken me to many corners of the globe, and yes many have said it’s a big loss for them. I’ll miss many folks over here.

But I’m also excited to be joining what I understand is a fantastic technology team at Bloomberg, and to be once more directly involved in helping shape a defining story of our times: the ascendancy of China.