Cheng leaves one-year Google post for role at Bloomberg

Google hired Cheng, the former publisher and managing editor of FT.com, to become its director of product management for advertising in Europe.

Cheng was the most senior digital executive at the Financial Times and was credited with being a driving force behind the newspaper in Asia as well as helping to turn around FT.com.

In his new role as chief of staff for Bloomberg's multimedia arm he will focus on the financial-data provider's television, radio, digital and mobile properties as the financial news giant looks to become less dependent on revenues from terminals.

He is the second digital executive to be recently hired by Bloomberg. In April it hired Kevin Krim, vice president of product & strategy at Yahoo! HotJobs, was hired last month to run Bloomberg.com.

In an email to colleagues Cheng said that his year at Google had been "shorter than expected", but explained Bloomberg had offered him the "dream combination" of returning to the news business and running a technology department.

Cheng, in his new role, will now report to Bloomberg multimedia CEO Andy Lack who is the former Sony BMG chairman and NBC News president hired by Bloomberg last autumn.

Cheng is part of a growing exodus of senior staff from Google. Senior Google sales executive Tim Armstrong left in March for the CEO role at AOL, swiftly followed by Jeff Levick, former vice-president of industry development and marketing at Google, who was poached by Armstrong.

At the end of last month it was announced that the president of Google global display advertising business, David Rosenblatt, was leaving the company.

Another departure was that of Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, the president of Google's Asia-Pacific and Latin America operations.