BGov: Your Daily Racing Form for business

Jack Shafer of Slate.com writes Thursday about Bloomberg Government, the news service being launched at the beginning of next year that will cover the intersection between business and government, and likens it to a horse racing tip sheet.

Shafer writes, “The burgeoning genre represented by Bloomberg Government exists not because an audience wants to read such journalism without romance but because it must. Like a horseracing fan needs the Daily Racing Form, businesses need a guide to help them game the Washington system, especially in these days of endless quantitative easing and rampant government intervention.

“Although $5,700 for a subscription to Bloomberg Government might sound steep to you, it’s chump change for businessmen who become the first in their cohort to read Line 125 in a pending bit of legislation and can place a bet on— or against — it in the market. Nor is this kind of high-priced government news anything new. The newsletters, which these new tip sheets resemble, have made millionaires out of hard-working journalists. Just last week, the Washington Post ran a profile of two gentlemen who started a Washington newsletter company 33 years ago and whose sales were estimated at $463 million in 2008. They’re so rich now that they own Atlanta’s NBA and NHL franchises.

“If I were a Washington newsletter owner covering energy, banking, pharmaceuticals, taxes, transportation, telecommunications, or any of the other realms the federal government lords over, these encroachers would make me very nervous. Remember, Bloomberg stole the lunch of Dow Jones’ Telerate division with his famous terminals that made it easy for investors and other money managers to manipulate market data to the nth degree. Just as Bloomberg and his terminals excelled at sponging up micro-pieces of business and financial news and data and distributing them inside of the micro-news cycle, Bloomberg Government will do the same.”

Read more here.