Reuters Washington bureau chief Marilyn Thompson sent out the following staff announcement on Tuesday afternoon:

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Caren Bohan is returning to Reuters as Domestic Policy Correspondent.

Caren left us last year – not long after her starring role at the White House Correspondents Dinner – to become Managing Editor for Policy at National Journal. At Reuters, she had been an important part of our White House team, covering the Obama and Bush administrations. She wrote about international summits, the federal budget, the war in Afghanistan and the Arab Spring. In 2008, she was the lead correspondent for Reuters covering Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

In her new role at Reuters, Caren will work with our domestic policy team to write about issues that bring together the White House, Capitol Hill and federal agencies. She will work daily stories and help us steer longer-term enterprise projects.

Caren is a natural leader whose years in Washington have earned her wide respect. She served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association from July 2011 to July 2012.

Born in Boston, Caren earned a B.A. in English Literature at McGill University and holds a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley. Earlier in her career, Caren covered economic policy and financial markets for Reuters, first in New York and then in Washington.

She will return to the bureau on April 15. Please join us in welcoming her.

Longtime business journalist David Greising has been hired to run the Reuters’ Midwest bureau.

Sandra Guy of the Chicago Sun-Times writes, “At Reuters, Greising replaces Peter Bohan, who will focus full-time on the newswire’s Americas Service, a general news file sent to clients in the United States.

“Greising, a Chicago native and graduate of Indiana’s DePauw University, spent 11 years at the Tribune where he broke stories on the United Airlines bankruptcy, a scandal at Florsheim that cost the CEO his job, scandalous losses at Motorola and a series on problems in developing a global supply chain for Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner.

“After the Tribune, Greising worked as managing editor and general manager of the Chicago News Cooperative, leading a news team that produced a Chicago section for The New York Times.”

Read more here. Greising also worked for BusinessWeek in its Chicago and Atlanta bureaus.

The Guild and Thomson Reuters management last week settled all of their remaining PIP-related disciplinary disputes, bringing to a close, at least for now, a year-long saga that touched the lives and careers of 33 journalists, and unsettled hundreds more.

The fight over performance improvement plans led to the departure of Supreme Court reporter Jim Vicini and Washington senior economics correspondent Glenn Somerville, among others.

Under the agreement, verbal warnings that were given in 2012 to 15 journalists immediately before they received PIPs (performance improvement plans), will expire on their anniversaries this year if no further discipline is issued to them during the one-year period. Once expired, a verbal warning cannot be used as basis for a more severe reprimand, like a written warning, in the step-by-step path to termination known as progressive discipline.

The agreement, reached on Valentine’s Day as an arbitrator was about to hear the first of the 15 cases, says that an employee whose verbal warning expires may “without consequence, state that he or she has not received a verbal warning.” Normally, verbal warnings never expire under company policy, although their usefulness as a management stepping stone to more severe discipline diminishes greatly after a year. Under company policy, no records of verbal warnings are kept in personnel files, although employees’ supervisors normally keep their own records.

If any of the 15 journalists receive additional discipline (which would have to be based on something other than failing to meet PIP or appraisal goals) within the one-year period, the original verbal warning would remain in place, but the Guild would be free to challenge it along with the additional discipline.

“We think this settlement will help employees and their supervisors put this episode behind them without in any way impeding the Guild’s ability to defend its members in case things don’t turn out the way we hope,” said New York Guild Secretary-Treasurer Peter Szekely.

Read more here.

Thomson Reuters, the parent of the Reuters news service, plans to cut up to 4 percent of its workforce, or 2,500 jobs, while its profit rises.

Jennifer Booton of Fox Business writes, “The company said on Wednesday that it expects to spend about $100 million on severance costs, predominantly in the first quarter. A majority of the cuts will take place in its finance and research division.

“Shares of Thomson Reuters slumped 2% in morning trade.

“The New York–based publishing and financial services giant said its turnaround is about halfway complete and remains on track, which includes simplification across the business, improved transparency, disciplined spending and leadership transformation.

“The overhaul efforts position Thomson Reuters to ‘build a foundation for stability in 2013 and profitable growth in 2014.’ The company said net sales will gradually improve with product rollouts, customer service improvements and consolidation.

“The announcement comes as Thomson Reuters posts fourth-quarter operating profit of $658 million, up 2% from $646 million a year ago.

“Excluding one-time items, it earned 60 cents a share, topping average analyst estimates of 55 cents in a Thomson Reuters poll.”

Chrystia Freeland,  Digital Editor of Reuters, sent out the following staff hire announcement on Tuesday:

I am delighted to announce that Jim Roberts will join us on February 25th as Executive Editor, Reuters Digital. In this newly created role, Jim will report to me and oversee the editorial work of Reuters.com and our global family of Reuters websites, our opinion team and our online video operation. Jim, who was a masthead editor at the New York Times, brings to this role a unique and ideal combination of new and traditional media skills and experience.

Since 2006, Jim has been the Times’s chief digital editor and evangelist, first in the role of Editor of Digital News, and most recently as an Assistant Managing Editor. He led a vast expansion of NYTimes.com from 2006 to 2009, and helped build and lead a team of multimedia experts that has two Emmy Awards and one Peabody to its credit. His passion for news brought energy and urgency to the homepage of NYTimes.com, through breaking news stories like the financial meltdown and recession, the Haiti earthquake and the Arab Spring uprisings, as well as the Times’s ongoing digital coverage of the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns.

Jim was an early champion of social media. Jim was a strong advocate for the development and promotion of New York Times video and helped lead the buildout of live video coverage of the 2012 campaign.

Before joining the Times’s digital team, Jim was National Editor of the New York  Times and the paper’s national political editor during the 2000 campaign. He also worked as an editor on the Times’s metropolitan and sports desks. Before joining the Times, he worked in a variety of reporting and editing jobs in Richmond, Va., Baltimore and Dallas.

Please join me in welcoming Jim to Reuters and if you’d like you can join his more than 80,000 Twitter followers @nycjim.