

Bloomberg News: A Modest Strategy to Rule the World - jakarta
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/media/15bloom.html?ref=business

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JimmyL
Bloomberg's offices are, depending on who you ask, either fantastic or
terrible.

Yes, they've got a bunch of art and screens everywhere (including a curved
escalator, which I had never seen before I went there). Yes, there are some
great free snacks. Yes, there is some nice public art, and a decent corporate
dining room.

On the other hand, it's still somewhat of a sweatshop. The whole office is
open plan - the highest dividers between workstations rise about seven inches
above desk-level and louder than they describe it. The whole building is
covered in monitors that display, in real-time, information about how terminal
sales are going. When you pull up an employee's internal profile page (which
is accessible to anyone within the company), it lists what time you badged in
and out for the past week.

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ig1
The layout of the office isn't significantly different to what you'll find at
any modern investment bank, open plan offices are the norm in the industry. So
much so that when they filmed the movie "A Good Year" the scenes of a trading
floor were actually filmed in a Bloomberg office rather than at a bank.

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jamesbressi
Doesn't ANYONE notice the problem with this sentence?

“We want to be the world’s most influential news organization,” says Mr. Lack,
who oversees Bloomberg’s television, radio and dot-com endeavors.

The most influential? If there was ever a more honest statement. Why should
news be influential and not informational?

You aim for influence in the news because politics and business are at your
mercy? I'm ok with that, but don't call yourself a "news" organization.

News is as cheap as love.

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jakarta
Yeah, but in order to get that quality information typically you need to be
one of the higher regarded 'brand' news organizations. The journalists at the
WSJ and the NYTimes are probably going to have better sources than those at
Bloomberg and in turn break better stories... making them more
"informational".

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jamesbressi
I understand your logic, but starting with the Drudge report in 1998 -- when
they were the first to break the Monica and Clinton scandal -- it looks like
the flowered garden is no longer and anyone can break a story.

I don't believe it is "getting quality information".

No, it is "controlling information."

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MikeCapone
Now if only they could invest some of that money into a better website...

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MikeCapone
Looks like the article addresses this point:

"It’s also trying to revamp its Web site and television programming — long
neglected inside the company — into services that appeal to people who don’t
trade securities for a living."

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wglb
So does this suggest that news organizations are not self supporting, that is,
Bloomberg's fees from the financial data seem to support the news
organization.

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jakarta
I think that as it stands, this is the reality. The Washington Post is similar
in that their Kaplan business supports the newsroom.

What I think may happen though, is that players like WaPo and Bloomberg will
ultimately emerge with profitable news businesses because competitors will go
out of businesses and their assets will be able to be picked up at fire sale
prices and benefit from a lack of competition.

