Bloomberg News making push in Canada

Bloomberg News is expanding its operations in Canada in an attempt to take market share away from its competitors, reports Tamara Baluja of the Canadian Journalism Project.

Baluja writes, “According to the most recent comScore results, Bloomberg ranks ‘a distant eight’ among online business websites in Canada—well behind ROB, Yahoo, MSN, Forbes, AOL and Dow Jones. And as Yahoo! Canada reported, ‘…for most in the business world, the name Bloomberg means terminals, the roughly $20,000-a-year computers many professional traders use to track the market … the journalism serves largely as a companion piece to the market data, providing investors with some context and analysis to accompany their trades.’

“Scanlan told J-Source that Canada has increasingly become a priority for Bloomberg.

“‘The world is starting to take notice of Canada,’ he said. ‘During the recession, the Canadian economy shone really well, and there’s a lot happening here that has impact elsewhere globally.’

“Take Calgary, for example, where Bloomberg has expanded its staff to three to cover energy and oil sands. Or Winnipeg, where the company positioned a correspondent for the first time last year, to cover agriculture.

“There are now 30 reporters and editors working for Bloomberg across the country, including several well-known journalists, such as Ottawa bureau chief Theophilos Argitis, recently named one of the 100 most powerful and influential people in Ottawa by the Hill Times, and Toronto bureau chief Jacqueline Thorpe, who worked for several years as a senior editor at Financial Post.

“Bloomberg also has reporters in Toronto, Ottawa, Vancouver and Montreal—and at press time, had job postings up for two more reporters.”

Read more here.