Bloomberg shakes up his newsroom

Ravi Somaiya of The New York Times writes about how Michael Bloomberg has made changes in the newsroom of his company.

Somaiya writes, “The media businesses, said a person familiar with their finances, are losing hundreds of millions of dollars a year for Bloomberg L.P., which gets the vast majority of more than $9 billion in annual revenue from its financial data terminals. Mr. Bloomberg aims to bring the media section’s losses under control, while ramping up the level of influence his company has in what he sees as a growth area.

“He told senior editorial staff members at a conference in New York early in January that when he left to serve as mayor in 2002 his company had one news organization. When he returned, he said, it had 12, referring to separate teams for the news wire, television, radio, the web, the magazines and others. The inference some drew is that Mr. Micklethwait, who starts work next month, will be tasked with unifying them.

“Mr. Bloomberg has been especially engaged with the revamping of his company’s television offerings, down to the finest details — he personally decided to kill the stock ticker scrolling across the bottom of the screen, and introduced information boxes on the right side of the picture, several employees said. He has also reviewed a new business news website, which is seen as a crucial offering for the company’s core business audience. The introduction of that site, scheduled for last Tuesday, was delayed, though apparently for technical reasons.”

Read more here.