Bloomberg on running Bloomberg

Matthew Garrahan and Ben McLannahan of the Financial Times explore how Michael Bloomberg has been running his namesake company and overhauling its media operations after returning to the company.

Garrahan and McLannahan write, “Overseeing this was the owner. In a lengthy profile in Politico magazine this summer, Bloomberg employees likened his managerial style to ‘putting cats in a bag’. This was driven home to the departing digital editor Joshua Topolsky when colleagues at his leaving party presented him with a bag of soft toy cats.

“It was clear which cat Bloomberg was backing: Micklethwait. In a lengthy memo to employees last month the editor-in-chief highlighted some of the changes he had enacted, such as ending ‘the anachronism of two separate newsrooms’. He wanted Bloomberg ‘to be true to our purpose’, which was to be the ‘chronicle of capitalism’. Bloomberg has supported his moves, wondering aloud on more than one occasion, ‘Why do I need a website?’ and making the case that freely available content could undermine the content on the terminal.

“Where these changes leave Justin Smith is unclear. Bloomberg himself declined to comment for this article beyond one statement. ‘Justin [Smith] and I have a great relationship and we are fully in sync on the vision for Bloomberg Media,’ he said. ‘He has a tremendous track record here that speaks for itself.’

“Yet some feel that much of the work Smith has done since joining Bloomberg has been dismantled. ‘I don’t know if Justin is trying to grin and bear it or not,’ says one person close to the situation. ‘They are unwinding all the bets he made in an extremely public way. That can’t be comfortable.'”

Read more here.