Michael Bloomberg, the co-founder of Bloomberg News with Matthew Winkler, has been named the winner of the 2015 Society of American Business Editors and Writers Distinguished Achievement Award.
The singles out individuals who have made a significant impact on the field of business journalism and who have served as a nurturing influence on others in the profession. A reception honoring Bloomberg will be held Oct. 7 in New York before the SABEW fall conference.
Past winners include Ray Shaw of American City Business Journals, Carol Loomis of Fortune magazine, Floyd Norris of the New York Times and Linda O’Bryon of “Nightly Business Report.” The award originated in 1993.
Former Salomon Brothers general partner Bloomberg founded the company that became Bloomberg L.P. with his severance pay in 1981. Originally, the company just sold computer terminals to Wall Street investment banks that included financial data about stocks, bonds, and other investments. That financial data still provides the bulk of the company’s revenue.
The company began what was originally called Bloomberg Business News with a six-person editorial team. Bloomberg hired Wall Street Journal reporter Winkler, who had written a story about Bloomberg for the Journal, to run the operation. The news service was – and still is – provided on the terminals, which are leased for about $1,800 per month. The first Bloomberg news story was published in June 1990.
During its first year, Bloomberg Business News opened bureaus in New York, Washington, London, Tokyo, Toronto, and Princeton, N.J., writing about the stock market and company news that had previously been covered by other wire services such as Dow Jones, the Associated Press, and Reuters.
By early 1995, the organization had grown to 325 reporters and editors in 54 bureaus and had started an investing magazine called Bloomberg Personal that was distributed as a Sunday newspaper supplement. The two main newsrooms at that time were in Princeton – for business and company news – and New York – for markets and financial news.
Bloomberg News is now one of the world’s largest news gathering operations. Its more than 2,400 journalists and editors write more than 5,000 stories every day.
