Peter Osnos of The Atlantic writes Tuesday about the increasing prominence of Bloomberg News in business journalism.
Osnos writes, “The decline in the resources at metropolitan dailies, the draconian cutbacks in network television news, and the dominance of polemic over substance on the cable channels are what make this era so unnerving to news traditionalists. The ascendancy of Bloomberg and Thomson-Reuters, which is also clearly embarked on a significant expansion of its staffing and visibility, does not offset the rest of the industry’s problems, but it does reflect substantial investment and, in the estimate of their astute owners, the prospect of profits from information that goes well beyond the masses of data that were the mainstays on the legendary Bloomberg software and the Reuters and Dow Jones runners up.
“To visit the Bloomberg headquarters for the first time is literally awesome. The building amenities are lavish (and depending on your taste maybe even excessive). The rows of terminals are arrayed in spaces all open to light and architectural flourishes. Fish tanks filled with exotic specimens, art and flowers divide the building into sectors with journalists, sales teams, and code writers in their respective banks. In particular, the multinational collection of engineers said to be mainly from China, South Asia, Russia, and Israel provide a buzz of technical intensity that clearly is the underpinning for the Bloomberg terminal’s assortment of services and breathtaking speed.”
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