Bloomberg View's new digs

Jeff Bercovici of Forbes writes Thursday about the new Bloomberg View opinion operation, pointing out that it will be housed in the same building as Michael Bloomberg’s philanthropy.

Bercovici writes, “David Shipley and Jamie Rubin, the co-executive editors of the new service, will technically be employees of Bloomberg LP, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be necessarily be working in the financial-news-and-data giant’s offices on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan. At least part of the time, they’ll be based in the Upper East Side offices of the Bloomberg Family Foundation, located on Madison Avenue and 78th Street

“A Bloomberg spokesman said this was a simple matter of necessity. ‘We are having real space constraints in our New York newsroom as we continue to grow,’ he says. (Bloomberg reportedly occupies about 700,000 square feet in the 55-story tower.)  ‘They’ll be able to work in both the offices at 731 Lexington and the offices on East 78th street.’

“But two Bloomberg insiders who told Forbes about the unusual arrangement said there was more to it. One insider described it as a way around the conflict-of-interest rules that force the mayor to keep a careful distance from the day-to-day management of the company. ‘His interaction with the company is so highly regulated,’ says one source with knowledge of the situation. ‘This enables Mike to meet with them, talk to them, have influence over what they write.'”

Read more here.