Why Bloomberg News needs to cover its parent

Noting that Michael Bloomberg won’t be listed in its new billionaires list, Ryan Chittum of Columbia Journalism Review writes that Bloomberg News needs to report on its parent the same way other business media report about themselves.

Chittum writes, “How can you write about, say, turmoil in Thomson Reuters’s markets division without writing about its chief competitor? Or write about the magazine industry without writing about Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s resurgence? Or calculate a Billionaires Index without tallying up your owner, whom Forbes says is worth $20 billion (which I should note is not enough to be in Bloomberg News’s Top 20).

“As I’ve written with The Wall Street Journal and News Corporation, I’d hardly expect a news organization to go out there and launch muckraking investigations of its parent. I said then that ‘What we should expect is that the WSJ, as a comprehensive business paper, will report the news as it develops, disclose its ownership, and display the story appropriately for its readers.’

“The same goes for Bloomberg.

“You can’t just not cover a major company sitting at the heart of a major beat when you’re a comprehensive news service. Nobody’s that special.”

Read more 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.