What can Bloomberg do with the FT?

Kevin Roose of New York magazine writes about three things that Bloomberg L.P. could do with The Financial Times if it acquired the business newspaper, as has been speculated.

Here is one of them:

1.) Combine the FT with Bloomberg Markets.
Bloomberg Markets — the monthly trade magazine that is given away free to all Bloomberg terminal subscribers — is the unsung hero of the Bloomberg media empire. It gets much less buzz than its stepsister publication, Bloomberg Businessweek, primarily because it’s a stodgier brand, not nearly as well designed and laid out, and less accessible to a nonfinancial audience. But some of its long-form investigative journalism, like this month’s expansive profile of Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, is exactly the kind of thing the FT — with its emphasis on short, jumpless stories written in inverted-pyramid structure — is missing.

If Bloomberg bought the FT, he could either make Markets a monthly insert (sort of like the New York Times does with T). Or, better yet, he could fold Markets entirely and move its writers and editors onto the staff of FT Magazine, the supplement that is already included with the U.K. and Ireland editions of the paper on the weekends.

Bloomberg may not want the FT to contain more long-form journalism. He apparently considers short, snappy stories an asset, not a liability. But he already has a news organization that excels at deal scoops and other to-the-point business stories, and he’s set up to deliver them instantly to trading floors around the world. And he already has a buzzy, general-audience magazine. The obvious hole is something that would be more technical than Businessweek but have the wider distribution of a general-audience publication. Making Bloomberg Markets the FT‘s long-form arm could bolster the paper’s credibility among the Wall Street crowd with minimal hassle.

Read the other two here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.