A tipster says that the 22 Bloomberg News journalists who made up its non-business, or 'World News', team were told the section was being scrapped last week, just before Christmas. As of today they have still not been reassigned.

Our source says journalists were told that:

...reports of natural disasters, plane crashes and the like will come from the AP, The New York Times, the Washington Post or Britain's Daily Telegraph.

He also adds that the scrapping of the department is, internally, a defeat for the tantrum-prone editor-in-chief Matt Winkler.

Tom Secunda, one of Mike Bloomberg's earliest associates, and Dan Doctoroff, sent from City Hall to oversee the company, have been campaigning for much of the past year for Bloomberg to concentrate solely on business news and leave the rest to others. None of this stopped Winkler, in interview after interview, to insist [sic] that Bloomberg planned to expand its general news coverage to compete on all levels with Reuters.

Chairman Peter Grauer was apparently also in the dark — when asked about the disbanding of the section by someone in the London newsroom, on December 18, he said it was "not on my radar screen."