Winkler: Bloomberg News early years had to overcome stationery company

Sarah Townsend of The National interviewed founding Bloomberg News editor in chief Matthew Winkler about the start of the financial news service.

Here is an excerpt:

What challenges did you face when setting up Bloomberg News?

The idea of data driving news is in some ways a very old-fashioned idea because what is news without facts, and therefore data? The challenge was obvious, in that aside from my own experience Bloomberg had no history of news – no pedigree, no lineage, no tradition, none of the things that would make building a news organisation from scratch easy. To give you an idea of the barriers we faced, in the earliest days of Bloomberg News in New York, our reporters would be making calls, as reporters are supposed to do, to people in the market, and at the time there was a stationery store on Wall Street and traders and investors would repeatedly tell our reporters to stop calling because these firms did not need any more stationery from “Blumberg”.

Another name but very similar. So it was a bit frustrating. But persistence is everything. And you’re only as good as your story. So if your stories are credible, then over time [it works].