Bloomberg TV's new look

Mark Seddon of The Guardian newspaper in London writes about the changes occurring on Bloomberg Television.

Seddon writes, “Steve Clark, the head of European and Middle East operations who was behind the launch of Al Jazeera English, says: ‘There’s a huge potential audience out there. We have more foreign bureaux than the BBC – 145 in all – and we have an army of specialist journalists, and what we will be doing is making our reporting more conversational and relevant to people. Business and finance impacts everyone.’

“There are new shows coming out of London. General news and sports programmes coming out of London in the five-hour European window are being followed by shows such as Global Countdown and Start-Up timed to coincide with the opening of the London markets. Last week Bloomberg signed ITN’s Andrea Catherwood, and more recruits recognisable to a British audience will be announced shortly. The London broadcast studio is brand new, with state-of-the-art, touch-screen plasma news walls, enabling anchors to move images around with their hands, as well as state of the art plasma floor screens.

“Bloomberg’s 457 news staff and 131 multimedia employees enjoy a ultra-modern cafeteria at the company’s London headquarters, which is free at the point of use for the more than 3,000 employees based there. The London broadcasting chief, Brian Martinez, and Steve Clark sit in the same open plan news floors, surrounded by colour coordinated tropical fish tanks. Martinez says: ‘We are looking to grow our operations where many other networks are cutting back. In New York we’ve added Charlie Rose and the ‘Intelligence Squared’ debates to our programming, and here we’ve signed up the FT Lex columnists to appear daily, exclusively.’ All three broadcast hubs, New York, London and Hong Kong are in recruiting mood. Branching out, Bloomberg has recently announced collaborations with UTVi In India and Cinermedia in Turkey.”

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