Bloomberg’s QuickTake analyzes the news, succinctly

The media are falling all over themselves to roll out new websites that give long-winded explanations of the news. Since the beginning of the year, such websites have been launched, or announced, by The New York Times, The Washington Post, ESPN and others.

Bloomberg News is taking a different approach to the trend with its QuickTake web page, quietly launched last year.

The page has 90-something stories, each about 650 words long, that take a big topic and break it down into three categories — The Situation, The Background and The Argument — and then gives the reader some links where they can obtain additional information should they so choose. The stories are short and to the point.

“It’s quite possible to be simultaneously succinct and sophisticated,” said Jonathan Landman, editor of QuickTake. That is “definitely the goal of QuickTakes. There’s a surprising wealth of info and analysis embedded in them, I think.”

Landman joined Bloomberg News a year ago from the New York Times, where he spent two decades serving in roles such as deputy managing editor, metro editor and culture editor. The idea that would become QuickTake was percolating within Bloomberg when he arrived. Landman’s idea was to take what he calls one of the virtues of newspapers — packaging — and provide content that is accessible and easy to understand.

“Some people in the company were noticing that terminal customers were having trouble finding things, and some of the most ambitious journalism that Bloomberg was doing was getting lost,” said Landman. “There was a yearning for topics pages to aggregate that content, to make things easier to find, to feature some of the more ambitious stuff.”

After arriving at Bloomberg, Landman wrote a proposal to write the QuickTake stories in a uniform format, noting that Bloomberg News has a roster of more than 2,000 journalists who are specialists in dozens of topics. He has a team of three editors — soon to be four — who assign the QuickTake and work with editors and reporters around the company.

The site launched on Oct. 1, and Landman says that the traffic to the page has “grown very nicely” but he does not disclose specific data.

“Coming to a news story that you read a lot but don’t understand — you want a little help,” added Landman. “Take the debt ceiling. We’ve all read 10 billion stories about the debt ceiling. You read about the politics about it and Ted Cruz’s filibuster and Obama’s posturing. But what is the debt ceiling, and where did it come from? Do other countries have them? Is it a good thing? Those are the questions that rarely get answered in a news story, and if they do, they’re way down at the bottom.”

In terms of how many QuickTakes that Bloomberg will publish in 2014, Landman says that’s not been decided.

“One of the virtues of a newspaper is packaging,” said Landman. “You can read all of it or as much as you want, and you can walk away and feel like an informed citizen. The Internet has blown all of that to hell. So much information comes to you that it makes you feel stupid because it emphasizes what you miss. So as we evolve this thing, one thought it to deliberately limit the number to topics that someone can bone up on. I don’t know what the number is.”