Bloomberg is creating a team within its Washington, D.C. bureau dedicated to reporting on campaign finance and lobbying practices, Poynter has learned.
The creation of the team was announced Monday by Senior Executive Editors Marty Schenker and Josh Tyrangiel during a meeting at the Bloomberg bureau in Washington, D.C. and represents an effort to bring the company’s financial reporting muscle to bear on politics as election season looms.
The team will comprise three full-time staffers to start. Josh Gallu, who currently covers SEC enforcement for Bloomberg, will lead the team, reporting directly to Schenker and Tyrangiel. He will be joined by Zachary Mider, whose reporting on tax evasion won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting. Also joining the team is Bloomberg’s Apple reporter, Tim Higgins, who will relocate from the West Coast for the assignment.
The team will also include three other journalists who will contribute as needed: Richard Rubin, who reports on tax policy in Washington, D.C.; Businessweek National Correspondent Josh Green; and Noah Buhayar, who covers Berkshire Hathaway and the insurance industry.
The creation of the team comes amid an initiative by Bloomberg to use the news organization’s political reporting resources, divided between New York and Washington, D.C., more effectively. In a memo sent to editorial staffers in April, Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait stressed the importance of better collaboration between that organization’s D.C. bureau and the New York-based Bloomberg Politics.
When I spoke to many of you a month ago, I talked candidly about the need to improve our coverage of American government and politics — and my feeling that the many different parts of Editorial have not been working together closely enough. Since then there have been many good things and a few well publicized bad ones, I have asked Josh Tyrangiel and Marty Schenker to spend the next three months going through all our coverage — and working out what we can do better, given the enormous pool of resources we have in this area.
Ultimately, Bloomberg plans to grow the number of full-time staffers dedicated to the team, according to a spokesperson for the company.
