Bloomber’s culture is about omniscience

Zach Seward of Quartz.com writes about the culture at Bloomberg that would allow its journalists to access information about its financial data clients.

Seward writes, “It’s not as though any of this justifies Bloomberg reporters snooping on customer terminal usage, but it should help explain how someone—indeed, hundreds of people—at the company could do it without batting an eye. And it points to a tension between Bloomberg’s culture of openness and its intense secrecy to the outside world. At Bloomberg, transparency only goes as far as the door. To the rest of the world, the privately held company is more black box than fish bowl.

“The confidentiality agreement that every employee must sign — including reporters, which is unusual in the media industry — is just part of it. They also generally must agree not to say anything critical about the company while employed or after leaving. Bloomberg staffers are genuinely terrified of talking about their company to anyone who doesn’t work there, a fear that was recently justified when Bloomberg immediately fired its social media editor after his private conversations, in which he called the company a ‘total mess,’ leaked online. When a Bloomberg staffer wanted to rat on his ‘Big Brother’ employer to gossip blog Gawker last year, he wrote it all down on paper rather than create a digital record.

“As a result, the public doesn’t hear much from Bloomberg LP, outside of occasional updates on terminal sales. In a sense, the paradox of Bloomberg’s transparency and secrecy actually describes its business model quite well: Data comes into the company — as much as possible, from wherever possible — but it doesn’t leave because, at Bloomberg, information is money.”

Read more here.