San Francisco — Google’s exodus continues: Ien Cheng, the executive who has served Google Inc. as a director for product management for the past one year, and accredited with his past experience as newspaper editor, is leaving the Internet titan to help it run the multimedia arm of Bloomberg LP, the WSJ reports.
Cheng, at Google was handling the company’s ad products in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, will now join Bloomberg as the chief of staff of its multimedia group, the WSJ reports.
“In his new role as chief of staff for Bloomberg’s multimedia group, Cheng will manage the financial-data provider’s television, radio, Web and mobile properties, he wrote in an email to friends and associates,” the WSJ’s Russell Adams writes. Cheng will report to Andrew Lack, the former Sony BMG chairman and NBC News president hired by Bloomberg last fall.
At Bloomberg, Cheng will conjoin former Yahoo executive Kevin Krim, who was hired last month to run Bloomberg.com.
Cheng’s appointment indicates a continuation of a broader effort by Bloomberg to trim-down its reliance on sales of the financial-data terminals that account for most of its revenue. The evaporation of thousands of financial-sector jobs in the past year has slowed terminal sales, prompting the company founded by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to focus on making money on the large news-gathering operation that supplies the terminals with news, say people familiar with the situation.
Prior to joining Google last June, Cheng was the publisher and managing editor of the Financial Times’s Web site. He is bestowed with increasing the site’s traffic substantially, particularly in Asia.
“This is an unexpected — and thrilling — opportunity for me to return to the news business and be at the heart of Bloomberg’s newly established ambitions to be a substantial player in consumer news,” Cheng wrote in his email.
The move comes as Google loses several top executives, including Google veteran, top ad-sales chief Tim Armstrong left in March to take over as CEO of AOL and then recruited Jeff Levick, who was Google’s vice president of industry development and marketing, as president of global advertising and strategy at AOL. Levick’s departure came shortly after David Rosenblatt, who headed Google’s display-ad business, said he was leaving the company. Another senior executive, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, President, Asia-Pacific and Latin America, also left the company recently.
Cheng is the latest in a series of Google’s senior executives to announce plans to depart the company since the beginning of this year.
Cheng, in his parting email to his associates, said his time at Google had been “shorter than expected,” but only because he was drawn to the “dream combination” of returning to the news business and running a technology department. Cheng had introduced FT.com’s multi-tiered access model in October 2007, mostly centered around giving 20 free stories a month to non-paying subscribers, for now it came down to just 10.