Bloomberg aiming to be the most influential

Gabriel Sherman of New York magazine writes Sunday about how Bloomberg LP is increasingly becoming an increasingly influential media organization.

Sherman writes, “Bloomberg LP began by selling pure information, and its journalism is still heavily influenced by a commodity model. The company’s self-professed mission statement is to become ‘the most influential’ news service in the world. Bloomberg’s agent in this effort is Matthew Winkler, a former Wall Street Journal bond reporter who joined Bloomberg in 1990. Like all Bloomberg staffers, Winkler has an open-air office. ‘One of the things that Mike bequeathed to us was a culture,’ Dan Doctoroff says. ‘A culture of being highly focused, somewhat paranoid, and we take nothing for granted.’

“Like Bloomberg, Winkler can be obsessive and detail-oriented. Winkler’s code is called ‘The Bloomberg Way,’ a 376-page rule book that all new hires are required to study during intensive orientation boot camps. The style was designed to strip all interpretation from the news, leaving behind nothing but facts (one famous rule has it that no sentence should begin with ‘but’). Winkler says his code is an homage to George Orwell, E. B. White, and Bill Zinsser. ‘Use one word when two will be good,’ he says. Bloomberg journalists are constantly evaluated for their productivity. Reporters earn points for the number of clicks their articles receive on the Bloomberg terminal. ‘It was well known and is well known that if you write a story about Goldman Sachs, sex, Viagra, Tiger Woods, and Barack Obama, you’d get a huge number of clicks,’ a former reporter says. At Bloomberg, the internal computer system monitors employees’ activities. ‘Anyone in the company can look you up to see if you’re at your terminal,’ a former staffer says. ‘It tells you how long your terminal has been idle.’

“In a way, Bloomberg LP is like Google: It has one wildly successful business model (selling data to banks in the case of Bloomberg; search in the case of Google). Efforts to expand beyond the core business of leasing terminals to financial firms have failed to produce similar results. In recent years, Bloomberg has grown through international expansion into emerging markets. But the company faces some challenges. Under CEO for multimedia Andrew Lack, Bloomberg Television has failed to eat into CNBC’s audience. Last year, talks to partner Bloomberg TV with ABC News broke down. Bloomberg has tried to attract stars, including offering CNBC’s David Faber a mid-six-figure deal. Bloomberg also went after the Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin. Neither could be swayed. Part of the problem is that Winkler remains resistant to adopting some of the entertainment values that could attract an audience.”

Read more here.