Tapping into the information gold rush

Keach Hagey of Politico.com writes about Bloomberg Government, the new service launched earlier this year by Bloomberg L.P. that covers the intersection between business and government.

Hagey writes, “That this is happening in the wake of the financial crisis is no accident. Wall Street’s meltdown wiped out whole companies that had been loyal subscribers to Bloomberg LP’s core terminal business, creating one of the few setbacks in the company’s nearly 30 years of steady growth. It also set off a push to diversify the company in a range of new directions, from consumer magazines with the purchase of BusinessWeek to, most recently, opinion writing.

“More important, the crisis and its attendant bailouts shifted the eyes of industry to the capital, creating a what’s been called a ‘gold rush‘ in the business of selling people information about Washington. A month after BGov, as it’s called, launched on Jan 4, POLITICO launched its own subscription product, POLITICO Pro, joining the ranks of the relaunched National Journal and CQ Roll Call.

“Mike Riley, an online journalism pioneer with a Fred Rogers smile, has the perfect resume to head up the editorial side of such an enterprise, having served as the editor of CQ until its merger in 2009 and consulted briefly with POLITICO on the project that eventually became POLITICO Pro. From his perspective, the ‘gold rush’ is less about a shifting American economy than a gradual awakening within the journalism industry to the fact that premium content can fetch a premium price.”