Micklethwait and the balancing act at Bloomberg

Ravi Somaiya of the New York Times explores how Bloomberg News has changed and evolved in the past year under the leadership of editor in chief John Micklethwait.

Somaiya writes, “Mr. Micklethwait denied that Bloomberg had cut back on investigative reporting. But he said it was true that the organization had refocused, a process that seemed to have resolved a tension between those who saw it as a media company with bold ambitions fueled by the terminals’ profits, and those who saw it as a more measured media company in the service of those terminals.

“Last fall, Bloomberg’s media group produced a graphic to clarify how it interpreted its customer base. It looks like the cross-section of a planet. The large, gray core is ‘Terminal Customers.’ Around it are thinner layers that represent audiences of ‘Global Finance Professionals’ and ‘Global Business Professionals.’ More general audiences are not mentioned.

“Mr. Micklethwait disagreed that his newsroom had become more reflexively establishmentarian. Bloomberg, he said, is a kind of ‘parish magazine of finance. And when we say this hedge fund is messed up this way or this bank has done this thing wrong, that particular banker may not particularly love us at that moment, but the rest of finance wants to know about it. And that I think is key.'”

Read more here.