Winkler recounts founding of Bloomberg News

Bloomberg News founding editor in chief Matthew Winkler spoke with Dean Rotbart of Business News Luminaries about the 30th anniversary of the news service.

Bloomberg Business News posted its first story on June 14, 1990. Winkler was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal who had written about company founder Michael Bloomberg and was hired to start the news service.

“It was symbiotic. As it turned out, the people that I wrote about and reported on for The Wall Street Journal in the securities industry were people he knew,” said Winkler. “The turned out to be his best friends. So he’s talking to his Wall Street circle of friends, and my name came up.”

“It took at least a couple of years for us to figure out working together that some of my best sources at The Wall Street Journal he considered his best friends,” added Winkler.

Winkler said he saw in Bloomberg, in contrast to the people who ran Wall Street, someone who was about the science of math and money.

“To me, that was far more compelling as we got closer to the end of the 20th century,” said Winkler. “He was using computers to get at the truth.”

Winkler said he looked for integrity, commitment and gratitude in hiring journalists to build Bloomberg News.

To listen, go 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.