Bloomberg looks to expand its market

Stephanie Clifford and Julie Creswell of The New York Times write Sunday about the efforts of Bloomberg to expand its news operations to attract more general-interest readers.

Clifford and Creswell write, “The ambitions for Bloomberg’s news operation were changing even before Mr. Pearlstine arrived. Bloomberg has used the cash spraying from its terminal business to hire an astounding number of journalists in recent years, becoming something of a haven in a downsizing industry. Top writers or editors from Fortune, Forbes and The Journal land there seemingly weekly. (Six of the company’s 11 executive editors have worked at The Journal.)

“Bloomberg now has 142 journalists in Washington, 196 in Tokyo and 30 in Paris. It recently opened bureaus in Nigeria, Ghana and Cyprus. It has won numerous journalism awards and, to cite just one example, has offered some of the shrewdest coverage of the financial crisis over the last couple of years.

“The problem is that all of this work is largely distributed through its 280,000 Bloomberg machines, so its audience is confined mostly to those who subscribe to its terminals. Bloomberg essentially has a giant army of reporters with no route to the broader media sea.

“To reach that broader audience and to have its name and its brand distributed beyond its terminals, Bloomberg has been dependent on newspapers to carry its reports.”

Read more here.