Three long-time biz journalists depart Bloomberg News

TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Ann Woolner, a Bloomberg News legal affairs columnist who wrote out of its Atlanta bureau, is one of three long-time business journalists who have departed the business news organization recently.

Woolner was terminated on Wednesday, and her e-mail was disabled the same day. Last year, she won an Atlanta Press Club award for her columns.

A Bloomberg spokesman confirmed her departure, as well as the departures of Jerry Hart and Bob Willis from the news organization.

Hart was the Miami bureau chief for Bloomberg News, covering state and local finance in the southeast U.S. and Puerto Rico since 2008.

He’d been with Bloomberg News since 1994, serving in a variety of positions including leader for financial-industry news in New York, senior editor for markets and economies in London, Paris deputy bureau chief, news director for Bloomberg Radio and a trainer of writers and editors in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

Before joining Bloomberg, Hart was an assistant business editor at The New York Times. He began his career as a metro reporter at the Miami Herald in 1968, after which he worked at newspapers in Boston, San Francisco and New York.

Willis was a reporter for Bloomberg in Washington since 1994, covering the U.S. economy. Before that, he had worked for Agence France Presse from 1987 to 1994. He is a Kenyon College graduate.

Woolner was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution from 1973 to 1986. She was later an editor at the Fulton County Daily Report, a business and legal newspaper based in Atlanta.