Bloomberg’s O’Brien on the craft of biz news commentary

Timothy O’Brien, executive editor of Bloomberg View and Bloomberg Gadfly, talks about the art of business news commentary.

Here is an excerpt:

What is the primary goal of Bloomberg Gadfly, and Bloomberg View as a whole?
We’re the commentary arm of Bloomberg News and our goal is to offer our readers a lens on the news that helps them craft their own opinion about a subject – to help them think more smartly about the flood of information cascading across their screens. View tends to focus on macroeconomics, public policy, business and geopolitics. Gadfly is much more tightly focused on markets, corporate news and financial services. Both properties have writers and editors around the globe and we have a global mission.

How do you decide what content to publish?
We want the copy to sing, we want the themes to be vibrant, we want the work to be empirical and data-driven as often as possible, and we want the columns to be unique. If a column doesn’t check most of those boxes, we won’t publish it.

Prior to joining Bloomberg, you worked as editor and writer for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, HuffPost and Talk magazine. How have these experiences served you in your current role?
I learned classic, fact-driven financial and business journalism at the WSJ and NYT. It built upon my graduate training in journalism, history, and business. Marrying that academic training with reporting felt very organic, and my time at the WSJ and NYT was very important in terms of sharpening foundational, core reporting skills. At Talk I learned how to fine tune the craft of feature writing. At the HuffPost I really learned about digital journalism and what was happening to newsrooms and reporting in the Internet era — which involved non-traditional, innovative things that I couldn’t have learned at legacy newsrooms like the NYT and WSJ.

Read more here.