Categories: OLD Media Moves

Can Joe Weisenthal change Bloomberg?

Matthew Zeitlin of BuzzFeed writes about whether former Business Insider executive editor Joe Weisenthal can change how Bloomberg News, his new employer, is perceived by markets news aficionados.

Zeitlin writes, “Weisenthal started his new job last Monday. To a company best known for its sober editorial style and monochrome data terminals, he brings an altogether different voice: Over-the-top, all-caps headlines, hyperactive tweeting, and outspoken opinions about who is on the right and wrong side of contentious economic debates.

“That combination was integral to Business Insider’s evolution from a scrappy, aggregation-friendly startup to one of the web’s best-known sources of business news. But it’s a distinctly different style to the work currently being done by Bloomberg’s 2,400-person news operation, which largely follows The Bloomberg Way, a strict and documented formula for writing the news.

“More than 320,000 subscribers pay around $2,000 a month to access Bloomberg’s near-endless pool of financial data and news via its terminals. That’s where the majority of the company’s estimated $8 billion in revenue comes from, and few see the new online efforts by Bloomberg Digital — part of the consumer-facing Bloomberg Media division — as likely to make a dent in that.

“‘Bloomberg is pretty well-saturated for markets coverage and adding a new markets-focused product really makes me wonder who the target audience is going to be for this,’ said Chris Roush, a business journalism professor at the University of North Carolina who runs the website Talking Biz News. ‘There’s definitely some tension between the core Bloomberg News operations and Bloomberg Media,’ he said. ‘I think a lot of people on the Bloomberg News side don’t understand what’s going on at Bloomberg Media and feel a little slighted.'”